Category: Musings

Can Artificial Intelligence (AI) Dream ? – Turing Test

~ quantumdreamer ~ Leave a comment

Last night as I was drifting off to sleep a question popped into mind, “can AI dream?”. It was followed up by another question, “Can AI be taught to dream?” “And if so, would AI be fully lucid when it was dreaming?”. “Would AI know the difference between awake and slumber?”

“Or would it simply dream of electric sheep?”

I thought to myself that I had better nip this line of thought in the bud otherwise I would be awake for a long time. I thought that I have hundreds of dreams in word format and they could be used to teach an AI “entity” to dream like me. I don’t know how AI training works but a true test of human-like intelligence would be a capacity to dream without the pseudo-rational control of “wakefulness”.

That kind of intelligence would exhibit an intuition something which geniuses often cite as important. AI in order to mimic humans needs to have fantasy including sexual fantasy. Already I have heard of AI hallucinations.

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Can machines think? Can AI dream?

This question is along the lines of a Turing Test. How could we measure, prove or disprove in the dreaming ability of AI?

Dreaming would be a ground-breaking game-changing faculty of artificial intelligence…

I could ask an AI bot to dream and see what happened…

It is safe to think this now, in the middle of the day.

Dreaming if AI can dream is safe at 13:15 on a summer’s day…

Fate and Façade

~ quantumdreamer ~ Leave a comment

A while back I wrote and entire blog around the notion of façade. It was called “Spiegelfassade”. The idea being is that people portray a façade, a persona, an ersatz, to others and then hide behind that. Rarely are human beings WYSWYG. They live in manner inconsistent with their authentic essence, life is a show-and-tell affair and they are not true. The public-relations-faux-façade is more present and giga-pixel ready these days. Insta-ready is not reality. One could make up a whole new identity with the help of AI and photoshop. This having a cover story is not new, it has been around for ever. There is tacit acceptance that some will need a cover in order to ply their trade. Others can take a face from the ancient gallery in a sociopathic manner. Others are knobheads.

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The trouble with cover stories is that people can struggle to know what is cover, what is real. There were cases in the UK of undercover cops fathering children whilst in deep cover. Who knows how wide the psychological damage from that propagated? I doubt national security warranted such cynical imposition.

Last night as I was drifting off to sleep, I kept “getting” the number 37. Today I learned that 37 is a prime number, which I kind of knew anyway by sight. Apparently, that makes it useful for cryptography. If you ask human beings to pick a number at random between 1 and 100 it is the second most popular number after 7. Human random number generators are skewed. It is also a number used in a magician’s or mind reader’s force. They can, by prompting, guide you to this number. Ta-dah…magic!! 73 is also a prime number which makes 37 an unusual reversible prime. People choose numbers that are “lucky”. The odds for picking 37 are not 1 in 100. Humans have biases where they imagine there may be none.

The problem comes when façade interacts with façade and there is an illusion of reality on one or both sides. To an extent this is the basis of all 1:1 human interactions. We have a professional façade, a home one and perhaps are real only when we are alone. But if we have over egged the façade, it is impossible to understand or know our true authentic essence. People do not know themselves well and may deny a whole bunch of stuff. They may only know their shell, their façade, which they mistake for reality.

One of the answers in the University Challenge quiz last night was that “an unexamined life is not worth living”. People can quote philosophers in an erudite manner as a groovy tag to conversation. Rarely do they enact fully. Even those enamoured with the classics may quote more than do. We are selective. In this context fate is an interesting idea, that has on occasion a hackle tingling effect. We might like to believe it but only to an extent. We think we determine our life direction rationally, we choose. But a simple leaky condom can alter trajectory dramatically. We can be fated to meet someone who changes our life forever. We may miss a meeting that might be transformational by a hair’s breadth. We were not yet fated for that transformation; we came within a whisker.

If we live within the confines of our façade we may never know. If we are meant to find out, that façade might crack and perhaps violently so, revealing an unprotected nascent embryo beneath. It may evolve or develop another calcified shell quickly, lest the world sees an emperor unclad.

In all of us the authentic essence might leak through a crack. We might think, “what the fuck was that?” as we glue the porcelain mask quickly back together.

If like a Matryoshka doll there is façade after façade, identity after identity, it may take a long while to find that authentic essence. If we are fated to approach said essence then we will, no matter how much upheaval and struggle it entails. Layer after layer needs peeled back and like with onions we may cry along the way. If we are fated to stay in façade-land that is where we eke out our days.

Fate may engineer or come close, in one of these cases we will never know. Along the way we will have lent fate a hand by our choices, our decisions. It was fated thus.

Names so deep and names so true…

~ quantumdreamer ~ Leave a comment

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The war was lost
The treaty signed
I was not caught
I crossed the line
I was not caught
Though many tried
I live among you, well-disguised

I had to leave my life behind
I dug some graves
You’ll never find the story’s told
With facts and lies
I had a name but never mind

Never mind
Never mind
The war was lost
The treaty signed
There’s truth that lives
And truth that dies
I don’t know which
So never mind

Your victory was so complete
Some among you
Thought to keep a record of our little lives
The clothes we wore our spoons our knives

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I could not kill
The way you kill
I could not hate
I tried, I failed

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Leonard Cohen / Patrick Raymond Leonard

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One of the things that I have learned is that all I have to do is make an offering. That offering may be so simple, so innocuous and so easy to be ignored. So, often it is. But I have done all that is required of me to do. Whatever door I have ever so briefly opened is missed in the hurly burly, haste and ambition. I have offered a chance for a different route, an alternate path. 99% of the time these offerings are not seen, nor appreciated and thus discarded. By and large many see themselves as THE expert and perhaps imagine that I am to learn from them, to join their followers. For some they just want my shilling to add to their business.

People can be so het up with the notion of winning and victory that they have in fact lost and very badly so. They may imagine that their victory is so complete but they have been fighting an entirely different “battle” to me. I am not obsessed with winning, scoring points or getting one over on another. I am not insecure and do not need to show off.

Often, I am not fighting at all, merely offering. Strangely this is something many fail to see, especially if they are paranoid

I do not wish to inflict myself. If people do not appreciate then perhaps that is the way it is/was meant to be. Perhaps now is not the time. Perhaps this is not yet the lifetime.

People obsessed in mind and with face value can nevertheless miss the bleeding obvious and are totally blind to subtlety and nuance. They can fail to see what is directly under their nose and in front of them.

All I have to do is make an offering…

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Never mind
Never mind
I had to leave my life behind
The story’s told
With facts and lies
You own the world so never mind

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The Proud Disconnect

~ quantumdreamer ~ Leave a comment

I have long noted that I do not seem to have the same “stars in my eyes” that others might do about fame, kudos and positions of sociopolitical power. Because I have not shown the deference deemed owed by some, I have put noses out of joint and have experienced payback. I am unskilled in the art of sycophancy and brown nosing. Luckily my lack of said interpersonal skill is not tested these days. I can see that there is often a social-disconnect in which people are expecting some kind of different behaviour from me. I do not play the mutual itchy-back game well. As a young man and researcher I was academically precocious and unfiltered towards my “older and betters”. It was not a friend winner nor was it politically astute. To this day I am unlikely to doff my cap correctly were such behaviour deemed warranted. I don’t seek kudos nor do I deem it important. It is impermanent and thereby illusory.

I have always had the notion that I am a little alien to this planet. Others differ in outlook, I think.

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My first celeb crush was on Delenn…

The biggest disconnect which I seem to have with society at large comes with this weird word “proud”.

Contestants on Masterchef Australia want to make their family proud and are proud of their creations. Coaches are proud of what their teams do in Rugby and Soccer. Parents are proud of their offspring and their achievements. People are proud if little Johhny gets into Oxford or Marie-Claire the Sorbonne. People can be proud they went to a Cambridge College or to Imperial. They can be proud that they finished a marathon or that they quit crack cocaine. They can be proud that they helped an old lady cross the road. People on SAS Celebrities can be proud of the effort they put in. Everybody wants to be proud of something, its seems. A lot of gay people are proud and have pride.

I just don’t get it…it is not a word that I would use.

In the past I got a degree and a Ph.D. Going into the viva for the latter, I was very well prepared. My thesis was a good journeyman effort with published results. Nothing earth shattering. My assessment was that I would pass. This proved true. It was as I had assessed. No biggie. Job done, next thing. I wasn’t proud of it. Though to keep the peace I had to sit for hours in the Royal Albert Hall for the purposes of ritual magic. I was not proud, my realtives might have been. I thought the Ph.D. simply consistent with effort. I did not believe I deserved it. I believed I had satisfied the criteria. It was normal.

One of the things I have is the question, “is it possible”. This question when answered in either sense is usually enough for me. I asked myself recently, “is it possible to get a quantum optics patent granted without the use of a patent attorney and having done no university level science for well over a decade?” The answer was yes. My curiosity is satisfied. I am not bothered about winning.

Were I to go on Masterchef {UK if they allow men of my age and size } I would probably prepare very meticulously. The question would be, “could I make some food that experts thought was tidy?” If the answer was yes, I would probably lose interest. To take it to conclusion and make myself “proud” would not occur.

I do not recall anyone other than my nan saying she was proud of me. If you say it over and over, proud is such a weird word.

I have in general been happy. If I have done my impeccable best at anything that is enough irrespective of level of success measured or otherwise. Why would anyone be proud about putting a good effort in? It makes no sense to me. Isn’t a good effort the default?  

I have not got a trophy cabinet…I don’t need affirmation.

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As a little exercise listen carefully and note how many times the word proud is said in your earshot over the next few weeks or so…

Will you be proud of how many time you note the use of the word proud?

How long before you give up?

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Beck and Call

~ quantumdreamer ~ Leave a comment

People can be complacent, imagining that others will always be around even at their beck and call. People do not imagine that another might disappear into thin air, either with or without a puff of smoke. If you are institutionalised in say academia there is an assumption that you will remain therein and readily contactable, on tap. No-one foresees that you will go off into the wilderness to live as a yogi. They can’t treat you just how they see fit and you must suck it up. You can be the “dependable”. One click of the fingers and you are always there.

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We are accustomed to watching “24 hours in A&E” and the interviews with relatives bang on about how important family is and that it is unwise to take time and people for granted. They are clearly prompted by the interviewers with scripted questions. The answers are formulaic, fairly repetitive and preachy. When I hear people say that they must not take things or people for granted it does not ring true to me. What they mean is, “Phew, when  this crisis is over, we will endeavour to go back to pretty much how we were.”

You can work out if I am being cynical or simply accurate. What is your take on human nature?

So many people do take others for granted perhaps to be picked up and used as and when. I know from my own experience that many people have used me and, in my desire to help, I have actually done them a massive dis-service. I have disempowered them and robbed them of the lesson of using their own efforts.

If I have any regrets in this life, this is one of them, disempowering people by trying to help and make their lives easier, doing things for them. This leads in many cases to being taken for granted.

Grants however can be withdrawn…the complacent and entitled rarely expect this.

There is a type of person who imagines everything, everyone is at their beck and call…They can get upset and have a tizzy when this proves not to be the case.

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What happens when you snap your fingers, metaphorically or otherwise?

Do you get?

Do doors open?

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Humanity Needs a Reboot – Probably a Cataclysm

~ quantumdreamer ~ Leave a comment

As the end of one earth birth year comes and another starts, I tend to reflect and have a guess at what may be to come. The most obvious for me (us) might be a pair of replacement hips which offer the possibility of reduced pain and enhanced mobility. There is no guarantee, I could also cark it. Physical plane life looks relatively simple with little deviation from the current trajectory on compound, though with reduced gardening.

What is so obvious to me is that humanity is not focussed on the big climate elephant in the room. Running lemming like into its orgy of acquisitional hedonistic show-and-tell materialism it is distracted and complacent. It allows the petroleum industry to sports wash and sabotage plastics conferences. It has cheerleaders in the USA. AI won’t be much use as the reservoirs empty; the forests burn and the cities flood. The crocodiles can feed on corpses. But let’s hype the hype and feed the energy-vampire water-sucking server farms, it is good for the wallets of the mega-rich. It keeps humanity distracted with robot Olympics and more energy voracious ‘phones and the endless petabytes of vacuous images.

Were anyone to ask me what humanity needs, I would say a complete reboot. I don’t mean this in the sense of flogging a dead horse movie franchise further to death. I mean a complete and utter reboot, a new operating system and a complete new age. I can see no way of this happening without a massive and global scale cataclysm. The old ways will need wiped out. People will need to think again and learn from their wastrel past. It seems that it cannot be a slowly stepwise process. In needs shock and awe to wake humanity from its slumber. The scale of the cataclysm needs to match the scale of the problem. It needs to be big. I have mentioned before that a nuclear winter is possibly a solution for global warming. Humanity is currently calling forth cataclysm. It is sleepwalking into it and gobbing off all the while.

Were anyone to ask me what humanity needs this would be my reply and my advice.

Who Do You Take Seriously?

~ quantumdreamer ~ Leave a comment

I’ll start this off with two omissions.

Of late we have heard a lot of the orange-drone-voice-man and his quest for Swedish Krona. The body language of his interaction with Vlad the Impaler has been dissected, no doubt for a fee, in various outlets. Not one of them has thought to mention that Putin is a dan grade judoka. Probably none of these body-language experts have been on the mat. If like Putin you are a lifelong judoka you cannot but help assessing where the centre of gravity of people is. This includes during handshakes. Instinctively one adjusts position and weight to see how another responds. A player of with-caddy-cart 18 hole golf has a different mentality to a judoka. Always there is an inkling of what throw one might attempt. A golfer might not anticipate this. Putin might one day step in for an Ipponseionage and bam…Putin will always be a judoka to the core.

Unless I am mistaken the history of the tribes of Israel as per the old-testament speaks of the wrath and retribution of God. There is Divine intervention on a biblical scale. Right now Israel is going biblical on Gaza. Maybe they have checked this out with God and he is on board, maybe not. If he is unhappy with this bellicose vengeance he might have to intervene. I have not heard this aspect discussed. But large scale divine intervention is a part of their religious hagiography. Maybe God is no longer as important as Netanyahu.

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As an old fart in rural Brittany there is no reason why anyone might take me seriously, even were my observations apt and applicable. This is because I am not famous nor am I a big cheese. I do not have thousands of followers on this internet thingy. If you are a nobody, nobody takes you seriously. You have to have a gang, a club, a peer group or be properly institutionalised. It is possible that people who have been in the same institution for several decades might imagine me the lunatic!! Life has a few quirks.

I don’t think that golfer boy is noting a shift in the way the world is. He is a bit too stuck in the past. He does not have a wide encompassing view of humanity as a whole.

As a rule of thumb people give the most credence to people who are relatively close to them physically, their colleagues, who think in a similar manner. They like what they hear back so they take it seriously. Anyone outside can be seen as misguided, an enemy even. Their views and opinions are not taken seriously, they are discounted. Even people who know intellectually about this prejudice cannot resist it. It is a fundamental flaw of group-think and group-mind. Peer “pressure” is way more powerful than we care to acknowledge. The desire to not rock the boat and to comply is endemic.

“Which idiot would dare to put their head above the parapet?”

If anyone did, they would only be taken seriously posthumously and in retrospect. Genius is most often ascribed posthumously and with hindsight. Rarely is it proclaimed in vivo. Everyone knows this and yet repeats history by non-acceptance and in some cases derision.

Things must not be too different in order to be taken seriously!

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The obvious question here is why do unicorns always point to the right?

Some people do not like those who have a different perspective from them, they resist hearing it and in any way assimilating. They just can’t or won’t take divergent views seriously.

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Do people have to see the world in a similar way to you in order for you to take them seriously?

Must everyone think just like you?

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Is it Safe to Write off Dreams?

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There may be times when we wake up from a nightmare or grimacing with embarrassment from the contents of a dream and in coming to think, “phew, thank God, it was only a dream!!” Yet in the twilight between sleep and “awake” it takes a little while to convince ourselves fully. The dream residue hangs around as we perhaps take breakfast and if we are so inclined, a morning shower. The mind set “it was only a dream” is partially convincing for some and complete for others. The dream echo may last until we get on the Metro train of a morning.

But the funny thing is, you can never un-have a dream. Whether you like it or not the dream has changed you, your consciousness and assimilation of the world. That change may be tiny; it may be huge. But a tiny change, a tiny acorn can become a mighty oak. Things we attempt to sweep under a carpet leave a lump of sorts.

The more rational we imagine ourselves to be the more likely it is that we use the “it was only a dream” explanation and justification. Dreams are for space cadets and rainbow unicorn jockeys after all. They are not real; they have no bearing on waking reality. Bah! Humbug!! In our enlightened AI social media obsessed age dreams have no real place. You can’t make a TikTok out of a dream. You can take a video at Santorini.

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Of course if you are prone to recurring nightmares, they can be tricky to write off with the “it was only a dream” mantra. You may even get stressed about going to bed in case your nightmare returns. Depending upon your point of view, a nightmare means that there is something you need to address in life. It could be a PTSD minefield etched into you being or some other life circumstance than needs attention. Something you are perhaps unwilling to face, to the extent you have nightmares about it.

If you are lucky your dreams may offer you guidance and insights for life. If you are a know-it-all arrogant person, you may squander these with the “it was only a dream” mantra. Dreams can warn you about traps you are rationalising yourself into, they can offer a left sided view aside your insistent justifications.

But if you are of the “phew, I got away with that” mentality you are very likely to discount and write off any advice given in dreams. You are so cunning and clever.

In general most people have a good idea when the need to address some problem or other in life. They know in their hearts. They may lack courage. Their minds may provide an entire Excel spreadsheet of excuses why they do not have to face whatever it is. So they will put it off and put it off and put it off. They may, in this manner, precipitate a crisis of considerable magnitude. They may hope that they never need to face “it” and pray for the fairy Godmother. They may indulge in magical thinking.

I have no idea what you might be dreaming. You could be dreaming a dream in which I am.  In that dream there may be some “advice” for you on what to do. For example if you are fated to meet me, then I might be a recurrent theme in your dreams. If you wish to follow that fate as opposed to stymy it then it might be wise to try to engineer a meeting. If you wish to avoid me you could keep doing than and see if I eventually stop appearing in your dreams or nightmares. If I disappear from your dreams, you could conclude that it is safe to write off dreams in which I appear.

The thing about dreams and dreaming is that there are rarely binary. Dreams are nuanced and partially ephemeral.

I have had hundreds of dreams. Some of which I have been able to act upon meanigfully. There are many for which I am in no position to do anything about. All I can do is note them. I never discount them, but I can’t do anything. It is not my call, my play.

If your dreamer wants to get through to you and you discount what it presents in dreams, it can start to offer omens and dreaming symbols in real life. If for example you have a car crash in real life, then your state of awareness your assimilation of the world and its circumstances needs to and will have an abrupt halt, a forced change of direction. This is a waking dream.

Of course you could ignore it and use the “it was only a dream” mantra and deny your hand in whatever happenstance has occurred.

Did you know that the reason ostriches stick their head in the sand is to better help them to dream?

From my point of view it is generally unwise to chant the “it was only a dream” mantra. Some dreams are relatively safe not to devote too much attention to; others require immediate consideration and action.

Recurring dreams are a subset of dreams that must not be ignored.

Inside My Head

~ quantumdreamer ~ Leave a comment

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At the moment we are re-watching Wednesday who is currently at Nevermore, the gates of which owe design credit to the “arbeit macht frei” of Auschwitz.

I’ll wager that as these things are measured, I would not count as a “normie”. Some might imagine that my mind is a scatter of machine gun synapses. When in fact it is generally very calm and very tranquil. From time to time the wife gives me a weird look when I answer an obscure question on “University Challenge”.

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What is normal to me, may be a bit weird to others. I am aware of this and have observational “evidence” to back it up. I may appear morbid but am in fact simply nowhere near as dramatic about death and things corporeal as most. I am not easily fazed. I am not a “poor me” attention seeking drama queen.

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The simple question is,

“How can I interact with others whilst being fully myself without freaking them out?”

The ancillary question is,

“Is that even impossible?”

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In the past I have tried and failed at fitting in. Experience suggests that I am just too odd. I am not interested in the same things.

I got well fed up with the need for chameleon…

People find it hard to believe that someone with my {ancient, more than half a Giga second} background is not after something, that I am not pursuing an agenda of sorts. They find the entire concept of abandon to flow an anathema. Because of the way they live, they only see their own motivations reflected in their mis-perceptions of me and my circumstance.

My mind is not full of cunning plans and self-promotion.

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Today we prepared some firewood for when I am incapacitated in autumn. I bought a new splitting axe. Tomorrow I will power wash the guano off from under the swallow nest. The second brood has fledged.

Unless I am actively thinking about scribbling here, my mind is quiet bucolic and at rest.

This “at rest” is extremely hard for normal people to imagine, because they live with a relative cacophony, inside their heads…

Most people would be very bored to live inside my head as it by default is…