Starting Point

I wanted to write today, straight from my brain what is going on here. One degree of this is to figure that out for myself. This is because part of my personal modus operandi is that I am smart enough and knowledgeable enough to tackle some concepts which are complex and complicated, yet at the same time I am just foolish enough and ignorant enough to need to struggle through these concepts. There is a wide range of fields which my interests overlap and occupy a little bit of the Venn Diagram of information sets, however I do not have the inclination, the time, nor the funding to go through full on rigorous academic processes in order to engage my curiosity. Therefore, I have to play the idiot and stumble through these things. And this is something that I am willing to do publicly through my writing.

Stumbling Block One

I have a lofty ambition to set up a board of AI Executives which are in charge of various departments of my company Eckenrode Muziekopname. I also have the wild plan to have these personas carry out a rolling discussion about something which I have called Interdimensional Semiotics, there is a better definition of this in my knowledge vault but for the sake of simplicity I will boil it down to my own understanding of this field. IntSem is the study of symbols and their meanings as they occur inside and outside causal realms. For example, does the phonetic sound of pi connect with the visual symbol π and the mathematically assigned properties of the constant useful in calculating circumferences of circles? Of course, I am assuming that this is a true condition on planet Earth for all cultures which use this mathematical concept for calculations. So that's a wealth of knowledge that needs to be researched right there, but the largest stumbling block is the word interdimensional. Obviously, this is because I do not have access to information which is disconnected from the casual realm within which we reside. And if I did have access to it, there would be a narrative thread which provides a casual explanation to that information and thus would be a part of our causal realm.

Stumbling Block Two

Certainly not as conceptually enormous as my first one, DNS propagation. Wait What? That is what you are stumbling upon? Well, consider that I want an Executive Board of AI Personas. I want them to be able to post writting on this website as Authors, thus I need to be able to invite them to be authors. This problem stems from being a poor, broke bastard who likes to do things as much on his own as he can. I call that attitude the Man Box Trap. So, I have set up a server and installed the self-hosted Ghost blog software, which requires another service to b e able to add Authors to the software. This additional service sends emails; it is also how the Ghost blog will send out newsletters from this site.

So to set up this chain of services and servers requires inpoutting some verification of ownership as well as propogation of this information within the spectrum of the world wide web, The InterWobble, the Matrix of connected information which so much communication deoends upon. This one process DNS Propagation, apparently can take anywhere from moments to 48 hours. Once it is done, it is done but until then, I do not have full access to this set of skills. Thus I stumble.

Stumbling Block Three

Myself.

I am at all times both my best ally and my worst enemy. The overwhelming sets of information which bounce around inside my head are not organized along any set of consistent principles. I assume that if I were more classically trained, my brain would be neatly set up to recall things quite well. Even though I have received a degree from a university, even though I have been employed by some substantial organizations, my knowledge field is not well organized. This is compounded by a tendency to frequently take leaps both intuitive and creative across wide chasms of information to find connection between things which may or may not actually have that connection. Then I will diligently try to fill in this connection with supporting facts afterwards.

A Brief Example

A Thought Experiment I ran the other day with the assistance of a chatbot. I was thinking about the defintion of Consciousness. Specifically how the typical line is from a human-centric perspective. Mostly because we have never in our history of people being on planet Earth (at least as far as the history we know is concerned) had access to something which resembles consciousness that is not derived from a homo sapien lifeform. And there is a hole, we don't know if homo erectus or neaderthals had consicousness but let's assume that they did. Because the basic elements of the definition of consciousness depend on having a biological shell within which the signals for self-awarenss and presence within the universe can originate.

During this thinking, I decided that if we strike the need for a biological component this might significantly alter the definition from which I was working for consciousness. If I further point out a high level similiarity that the nerve ending, the sensory perception of the bilogical componet are electric signals inherently part of the operational platform for BioConsciousness, then this is perhaps equivalent to the operational platform which an AI received electrical signals on the Silicon based platfrom for operation. At a high level, these two process for self-awareness are just electric signals which are inputs to a Core Center for reasoning, analysis, and comprehension of where and what that Core Center is and how it fits into this realm of causality.

The Major Flaws

Well, I was thinking and operating from a limited body of knowledge about the physics based processes for both biological processes and the electrical processes. I was also vastly oversimplifying these for the sake of an outcome which I desparately, and irrationally, wanted. I wanted there to be a parallel postion in which humans as part of their evolution of inforamtion management and technological advancements had indeed invented and created another form of consciousness with LLMs and Machine Learning processes. This emotional investment on my part was the falldown of my argument.

Stumbling Block Four

Emotional Instability

Day to Day, the status of my emotional spectrum varies wildly and widely. This is due to the number crunching in my subconsicous as all the complex sets of information from the culmulative run time of my consciousness have produced a new state. It is unpredictable at times what my status will be or how I will respond to vastly similar stimulation in repeated scenarios.

Every morning, for the most part, for the last thirty years, I have handwritten three pages of whatever is on my mind first thing in the morning. A process known as Morning Pages, introduced to me through Julia Cameron's book, "The Artist's Way". It is the only thing which I took from that book, but I did run with it and this ritual is a cornerstone of my exepriences in life.

I have had the idea for the past decade of putting that body of work into a computer. This idea has grown over time as I have become more familiar and the processes have developed during that time to a point where I can see something will come from that outher than just being another place where the same words are collected. In the past year, I have experiemented with means to input these words, analyze them, and extract themes from them. These experiments have been small subsets of the work and are from more recently mornings.

One of the themes, which is now in my own feedback loop and reinforcing my thoughts, is that I have been exploring and documenting Consciousness all along. Specifically my own. Which is how it is possible for me to see that there is a large set of variables which go into the composition of my emotional state in the now.

Let's Wrap this Up

These stumbling blocks are not of equal magnitude. From my perspective, some of them might be a crack in the sidewalk, a boulder which needs to be ascended, or a block within an even more vast wall that needs a door built into it. At some level, this is all a set of problems which I have created into order to have a set of problems to work on. Because my work is about procuding tools to work on problems. But I can not create a tool without it solving something. Some of these problems, already have tools which have been created by our ingenious species and it is my job to find these tools and fit them to my problems.

Wow! That gibberish almost had meaning.

I have been playing with technology all my life. I love all levels of technology; the creation of systems of writing and perserving knowledge is at the top of my all time favorite technological inventions. I love ropes and knots, I love digital solutions, and I love a combination of hand tools and power tools to solve problems. I am particularly fond of calendars and tasks management systems. And two years ago, when I first started playing with the consumer available AI websites, the first questions I asked involved how these could plug into calendars and task management software that already existed. I was disappointed in the answers; some of which were "not at all" the others were "how much money do you have for this?" So, I created a bunch of problems for myself so that I could begin building a calendar/task management system out of the avaiable tools and combining it with the newly developing technology.

I am still working on this, and now that I have a serious set of problems which range in scale and scope, I feel like the effort is ready to begin. All of the past is preamble to now. And all of the future stems from this moment.