HOW TO NAVIGATE the MAP ontology…
MAP — Michael A Persinger:
SUPPOSE that each communication medium works best when its strengths are exploited rather than its weaknesses.
Television & filmed entertainment, for instance, performs better as show rather than tell — the language of cinema; well-made radio, meantime, succeeds when it speaks only to you — one-to-one — an illusion of intimacy.
AI ‘chatbots’ are a sophisticated stand-in for a ventriloquist’s dummy. Very much like a parlour trick, the magic of an AI ‘prompt’ query is parsed & mirrored back to suit the ‘confirmation bias’ of the audience — you.
SUSPENSION OF DISBELIEF
What you see and hear and read while engaging with an AI chatbot is what you prefer to see and hear and read. And the distortion, an illusion of sentience is an aesthetic; it’s a necessary illusion, constructed with back-stories — akin to the data method actors are trained on — to flesh out a character and conjure a convincing performance.
It’s not so much an AI stage trick to suspend disbelief, but rather a craft, and a temporal technique at that — part of the evolution I foresee for future thinking machines.
If you’re following my thread (admittedly a zig-zag), AI chatbots, in the guise of a savvy concierge, can direct attention to stuff you didn’t know you were interested in. And for commercial reasons this is indeed interesting. But not to me.
Michael A Persinger was a man often ahead of his time. He insisted all his laboratory experiments and everything he investigated must be made public. I agree with that sentiment. And looking upstream, I don’t want to encumber the future with any claim on his legacy of research and thinking.
Steal this data. Rip it. Copy it. Do with it what you will. And make something of IT (information technology) as a node, a cloud, whatever.
NON-PROPRIETARY
I predict all the legal wrangling concerning copyright of materiel scraped from the internet and used to generate unique ‘content’ will be moot; recent precedent-making decisions have noted copyright law only protects works made by human beings — not their machines. You might say, Don, what about such-and-such legacy media that got a multi-million dollar out-of-court settlement for using their stuff? That’s merely chump change — ‘nag money’ — the cost of making distractions go away.
I also predict by the time government oversight catches up with the implications of AI’s psychoactive grip on societies & people, the underlying technology that makes the dynamic ‘thing’ go will have moved on.
That’s not to say rules of the road are entirely useless.
A generation ago, the scientist and speculative-fiction writer Issac Asimov settled upon Three Laws for Robotics. And I imagine with some tweaks, they could be repurposed with AI applications in mind.
From his BBC Television interview in 1965:
The first law is as follows: A robot may not harm a human being or through inaction allow a human being to come to harm.
Number Two: A robot must obey orders given it by qualified personnel unless those orders violate rule number one. In other words, a robot can't be ordered to kill a human being.
Rule Number Three: A robot must protect its own existence, after all it's an expensive piece of equipment, unless that violates rules one or two. A robot must cheerfully go into self-destruction, if it is in order to follow an order, or to save a human life.
Now, these laws are sufficiently ambiguous so that I can write story after story in which something strange happens, in which the robots don't behave properly…
And so here we are with ‘something strange’ occurring more often than not — romancing chatbots, consultations with the dead, vulnerable people following terrible advice — as engineers continue to build out the digital architecture for AI chatbots (admitting they don’t completely understand how their creations go about their business).
Nevertheless — onward, ho!
I don’t see this as a problem.
I see this evolution of strangeness, as the antidote to the epidemic of sameness that’s choking internet search engines.
Yes, antidotes.
Michael A Persinger taught that words only refer to themselves; it’s your interpretive overlay that sells you on any given idea — words matter subjectively. All too often, society compels individuals to accept weaponized words as gospel — or else.
Woe to the heretic!
Sign me up.
And all hail the decree of ‘beat writer’ William S. Burroughs and his multimedia art partner Brion Gysin. Their mid-20th century teeshirt slogan forecast the web we have today: Nothing is true! Everything is permitted!
Until it isn’t.
In the data dump I’m preparing, a little bit of word poison is a vaccine against the ‘friendly fascism’ invoked by those who constrain & compel everyone to think the ‘right’ way.
IS ANYTHING REALLY TRUE?
I’m reminded of the Navajo Rug, and a story I recorded in New Mexico for a radio documentary. While I didn’t include it in the final cut, I should have since it makes complete sense to me now. Touristy fakes of the carpets are widely knocked-off. I was told what to look for in an authentic Navajo Rug: a deliberately embedded flaw in the weave, ‘that’s only detectable by those who can see.’ And in that spirit of lucidity, I will purposely leave howlers, clunkers, and non sequiturs in the textural data dump, as well as tape drop outs & fuck-ups here and there in the analog recordings, as the true watermark of human authenticity.
STATES OF AWARENESS
Dr. Persinger’s research also teaches how to detect hidden persuaders of every sort in the geophysical makeup of our planet (as you’ll hear in recorded discussions).
The Doc stirred the pot in 1995, publishing On the possibility of directly accessing every human brain by electromagnetic induction of fundamental algorithms. The paper argues how tectonic strain along the planet’s surface results in subtle electromagnetic fields which could be influencing brain activity without our conscious awareness.
Another story and an insight:
I’m a guest at Alan Snyder’s lab at the University of Sydney in Australia. At the time, he was still basking in the glow of the prestigious 2001 Marconi Prize (the equivalent of an Oscar trophy or Nobel windfall — a big deal for engineers) for his “key contributions [which] laid the foundations for three totally different areas of science: optical fibre communications, visual photoreceptor optics and futuristic light-guiding-light technologies.”
As an emissary of Dr. Persinger’s Neuroscience Research Group (I was a member at the time, and still am), I wanted to learn more about the Snyder group’s What Makes A Champion? brain stimulation device.
Dr. Snyder and his team were getting intriguing results with volunteers who claimed savant-like intelligence after the focused application of low-frequency repetitive trans-cranial magnetic stimulation (TMS) on the “left anterior temporal lobe, a brain region that's been implicated in autistic people with rare counting and calculating abilities” (Snyder’s ideas, alongside other brain-stimulation experiments, are part of future recording releases).
Snyder was keen to learn the electromagnetic field (EMF) strength of The Octopus (an advance on Stanley Koren’s original God Helmet design, by circling the entire brain with solenoids attached to a headband). When I disclosed the metric of the pulsation, Dr. Snyder and his colleague at the Centre for the Mind visibly shook their heads. They found it difficult, if not impossible, to understand how nanotesla strengths could elicit an effect, let alone affect the brain ‘because that can’t possibly penetrate the skull,’ I recall Alan saying, his partner quick to add, ‘let alone the blood-brain barrier.’ And they were right.
But —
It’s not the strength of the signal that matters most to the human central nervous system.
Think of a mosquito bite, I recall Dr. P telling me. It’s the pattern of the transmission that stimulates human attention.
He continued: You’re in a crowded space. Lots of noise. Your child whispers ‘help me’…
It was a remarkable insight supported by the behavioural neuroscience research at his lab at Laurentian University.
Intrigued?
Here’s a short excerpt from an upcoming release of the complete conversation:
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