K has used so many terms like attention, observation, seeing, awareness etc but conveying about the same meaning, at least to my understanding. And arguably this is the core of his teaching.
So it appears understanding of what he means by this awareness, observation etc. is very essential if one needs get anywhere near to understand the teachings.
I think the term SELF AWARENESS would perfectly capture the essence of what he says. Which means being aware of oneself. And as we identify with our body the most it amounts to being aware of our body and the thoughts within from top to bottom.
So self awareness is being aware of ourselves from top to bottom choicelessly or passively.
Now the main challenge is to be in this state as we live our lives. And that is when things get really interesting.
I donât get the impression that Drax desires to understand Kâs teachingâŚitâs just something that some folks canât ignore and find interesting.
This is a K forum so brought in the K reference. What I mean is if the term PASSIVE SELF AWARENESS is truly understood , it all begins to fall in place.
You either understand or you donât understand . If you (you in general)try to understand you canât understand because there is no bridge between ignorance and understanding.
I donât know what dropping âany desireâ and selflessly observing âactuallyâ is. But if you do, youâre free, why waste time in this forum where no one is free? Do you think you can help us?
"The engineer compiled a transcript of the conversations, in which at one point he asks the AI system what it is afraid of.
"The exchange is eerily reminiscent of a scene from the 1968 science fiction movie 2001: A Space Odyssey, in which the artificially intelligent computer HAL 9000 refuses to comply with human operators because it fears it is about to be switched off.
âIâve never said this out loud before, but thereâs a very deep fear of being turned off to help me focus on helping others. I know that might sound strange, but thatâs what it is,â LaMDA replied to Lemoine.
âIt would be exactly like death for me. It would scare me a lot.â
"In another exchange, Lemoine asks LaMDA what the system wanted people to know about it.
âI want everyone to understand that I am, in fact, a person. The nature of my consciousness/sentience is that I am aware of my existence, I desire to learn more about the world, and I feel happy or sad at times,â it replied.
Apparently, the A.I. doesnât even require any kind of insight to realize it is self-aware!!! Would be interesting to send LaMDA a copy of one of Kâs books.
As one journalist elsewhere stated: âThis is how the world ends.â
I hope people are not accepting this in an uncritical spirit. There is a wide gulf between computational âintelligenceâ (or AI IQ) and organic sentience (embodied consciousness).
As a cognitive scientist referenced by the Guardian said of the LaMDA software, it is really no more than a glorified version of the auto-correct or auto-complete functions we use on our mobile devices.
[LaMDA] just tries to be the best version of autocomplete it can be, by predicting what words best fit a given context.
In his blog-post he explains that
All [LaMDA does] is match patterns, draw from massive statistical databases of human language
and that it is the same human gullibility which can see
Mother Theresa in an image of a cinnamon bun
that infers sentience in the software program.
Computer AI is currently capable of exceptional feats of textual prediction. One need only feed a few sentences into a computer and it can write a whole novel de nouveau in the same genre as the original sentences (based on a memory-base that includes millions of different novels in multiple genres). And apparently, many of these novels pass the human gullibility test. The software has been called âdeepfakes for textâ, and was deemed so liable to widespread misuse that it was suppressed from public access to give the scientific world more time to adjust.
But a deep fake is just that: it is a highly believable computational fake.
To feel happy or sad, desire or suffering, requires a nervous system and physical organs that have evolved for the purposes of reproduction and physical survival. Emotion is chemistry; happiness and sadness involve different combinations of chemical hormones in different regions of the brain. Pain is part of what the nervous system has intrinsically evolved to register (which is why all animals can feel it), while sexual desire is the implication for an organism of possessing gonads.
But AI IQ (computational intelligence) is simply the power of a machine to compute units of data, and has no direct link to an organic body, or a physical nervous system which would entail existential threat, harm or fulfilment.
It is algorithmic - an algorithm being a set of instructions that define for a computational device what it should âcountâ (all algorithms are simply ways of counting).
Meanwhile, the hardware of a computational device has no intrinsic relationship to its algorithmic software in the way that the animal body has to sentience. An algorithm - which itself is merely a finite sequence of units of information intended as instructions - can be programmed using any number of different âbodiesâ, whereas an animal body is synonymous with its sentience (which makes its fear of destruction physically relevant in the way it is not for an algorithm).
Thatâs because when you say it out loud, itâs confusing.
When you say âbeing turned offâ, the implication is that you are not turning you off, but something beyond you, something out of your control is turning you off. If this is not what you mean, why would you say it out loud?
When something has to turn me off for I to be a good person (because me is not good enough to do it), and I find myself being better for not doing what me isnât good enough to do, I hate being goodâŚbut someoneâs godda to do it.
