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A collaboration of a neurologist, a computer scientist, and a philosopher has just put forward a new theory of consciousness. It is based on the idea of causal models. The authors claim boldly that their idea solves the hard problem of consciousness and explains why zombies don’t exist in nature. Really? I’ve had a look.

Paper: https://osf.io/preprints/osf/mtgn7

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We tackle the hard problem of consciousness taking the naturally-selected, self-organising, embodied organism as our starting point. We provide a mathematical formalism describing how biological systems self-organise to hierarchically interpret unlabelled sensory information according to valence and specific needs. Such interpretations imply behavioural policies which can only be differentiated from each other by the qualitative aspect of information processing. Selection pressures favour systems that can intervene in the world to achieve homeostatic and reproductive goals. Quality is a property arising in such systems to link cause to affect to motivate real world interventions. This produces a range of qualitative classifiers (interoceptive and exteroceptive) that motivate specific actions and determine priorities and preferences.

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Planck length and Planck time and quantum foam.

Space Emerging from Quantum.

The other day I was amused to find a quote from Einstein, in 1936, about how hard it would be to quantize gravity: “like an attempt to breathe in empty space.” Eight decades later, I think we can still agree that it’s hard.

So here is a possibility worth considering: rather than quantizing gravity, maybe we should try to gravitize quantum mechanics. Or, more accurately but less evocatively, “find gravity inside quantum mechanics.” Rather than starting with some essentially classical view of gravity and “quantizing” it, we might imagine starting with a quantum view of reality from the start, and find the ordinary three-dimensional space in which we live somehow emerging from quantum information. That’s the project that ChunJun (Charles) Cao, Spyridon (Spiros) Michalakis, and I take a few tentative steps toward in a new paper.

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Prof. Tim Rocktäschel, AI researcher at UCL and Google DeepMind, talks about open-ended AI systems. These systems aim to keep learning and improving on their own, like evolution does in nature.

TOC:
00:00:00 Introduction to Open-Ended AI and Key Concepts.
00:01:37 Tim Rocktäschel’s Background and Research Focus.
00:06:25 Defining Open-Endedness in AI Systems.
00:10:39 Subjective Nature of Interestingness and Learnability.
00:16:22 Open-Endedness in Practice: Examples and Limitations.
00:17:50 Assessing Novelty in Open-ended AI Systems.
00:20:05 Adversarial Attacks and AI Robustness.
00:24:05 Rainbow Teaming and LLM Safety.
00:25:48 Open-ended Research Approaches in AI
00:29:05 Balancing Long-term Vision and Exploration in AI Research.
00:37:25 LLMs in Program Synthesis and Open-Ended Learning.
00:37:55 Transition from Human-Based to Novel AI Strategies.
00:39:00 Expanding Context Windows and Prompt Evolution.
00:40:17 AI Intelligibility and Human-AI Interfaces.
00:46:04 Self-Improvement and Evolution in AI Systems.

Show notes (New!) https://www.dropbox.com/scl/fi/5avpsy…

REFS:

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When cars, planes, ships or computers are built from a material that functions as both a battery and a load-bearing structure, the weight and energy consumption are radically reduced. A research group at Chalmers University of Technology in Sweden is now presenting a world-leading advance in so-called massless energy storage — a structural battery that could halve the weight of a laptop, make the mobile phone as thin as a credit card or increase the driving range of an electric car by up to 70% on a single charge.

“We have succeeded in creating a battery made of carbon fiber composite that is as stiff as aluminum and energy-dense enough to be used commercially. Just like a human skeleton, the battery has several functions at the same time,” says Chalmers researcher Richa Chaudhary, who is the first author of an article recently published in Advanced Materials.

Research on structural batteries has been going on for many years at Chalmers, and in some stages also together with researchers at the KTH Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm, Sweden. When Professor Leif Asp and colleagues published their first results in 2018 on how stiff, strong carbon fibers could store electrical energy chemically, the advance attracted massive attention.

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