Artificial intelligence VS. Tulpa

[MadMax]

I'm curious, has the community made any connections between the AI and the possible future singularity and the Tulpa phenomenon? I.E. a construct, weather mental or technological, that has its own thoughts, feelings, emotions, and reactions to specific stimuli?

 

Another step I would think can be taken in this comparison is to say that an artificially intelligent being would be a Tulpa itself created by society's technological expertise, vs spirituality or mental discipline. 

 

What do you all think?

[TurboSimmie]

I think that a mental construct created from brain matter is always going to be qualitatively different than artificial intelligence, barring some unseen massive leap in A.I. technology. Right now thoughtforms created by human minds can become sentient, but A.I. cannot.

[Zen 禅]

These things do not meaningfully equate. A tulpa exists as a change of an already-sentient brain's experience of the nebulous set of emotions and feelings that relate to the brain's sense of self, which are not in any way fixed as it is. Tulpas are not the generation of a new sentient construct, at all, to be blunt, except in a nebulous wishy-washy abstract sense. You're not constructing anything new when you make a tulpa: you're stringing together several preconceived ideas you already have and deciding to change how they feel with self-suggestion.

Neurologically it's nothing more than a set of new behaviours and habits, and I actually think it does a serious disservice to what AI requires to reach sentience to consider tulpas anywhere near them. Making a new basic neural network AI meanwhile requires that you actually structure something's underlying logic, as if it were a brain. The goal with AI is to create something that has the capacity to think and have a self at all, not to manipulate an existing intelligence into feeling differently about its self.

[TurboSimmie]

That makes sense to me. Do you think A.I. will reach the point where it has that capacity? I know that's not really OP's question but I'm curious of your opinion because I've heard both "It's right around the corner" and "It'll never happen" in regards to A.I. sentience.

[MadMax]

@ZenAndRhys "You're not constructing anything new when you make a tulpa" on the contrary, when you have a conversation, it creates new pathways and new neural connections in the brain creating new memories and perhaps even effecting quicker communication between those parts of the brain. So in essence, yes, the process of creating a tulpa does make physical connections in the brain that were not there before.

 

@TurboSimmie That is the original spirit of my original post, that even tho AI has not (as far as we can tell) reached copiousness yet, there may be a point where it does become self-aware. Then, it would be total capable of producing it's own tulpa(s) just like we hosts do.  

 

 

[Zen 禅]

17 minutes ago, TurboSimmie said:

That makes sense to me. Do you think A.I. will reach the point where it has that capacity? I know that's not really OP's question but I'm curious of your opinion because I've heard both "It's right around the corner" and "It'll never happen" in regards to A.I. sentience.

Sapience will not occur without the machine in question being designed expressly for that purpose. The thing with a lot of recent hype around AI is that it very clearly doesn't pertain at all to sapience by itself. What we are training machines to do is more akin to sensing things correctly with a set of eyes like the most basic parts of the brain. A big part of the problem is that if we are going to make a machine think like a human we need to actually know how humans think first, and that's still a new science. We might end up doing something funky like using learning AI to figure out how a model of the human brain works and then using that to create general intelligence. Or we might need to advance in neurology and have an impressive human polymath AI specialist-neurologist be the first person who figures it out.

 

There's also the issue with size. An enormous modern AI isn't anywhere near the number of connections in the human brain yet and there are structural issues with actually trying to reach that size.

 

In short, I wouldn't want to speculate on how long it'll take myself. Practically speaking what we're doing with AI is the first steps. I'd presume the minimum timeframe would be decades, unless we somehow make a breakthrough in machine learning that allows them to do the work for us, which is speculative at best given machine learning's limitations at the present.

[Glaurung26]

What if make brain? 🧠🤷‍♂️

[Zen 禅]

8 minutes ago, MadMax said:

on the contrary, when you have a conversation, it creates new pathways and new neural connections in the brain creating new memories and perhaps even effecting quicker communication between those parts of the brain. So in essence, yes, the process of creating a tulpa does make physical connections in the brain that were not there before.

The overall structure of the brain is fixed. Reforming neural connections and pathways; and then potentially atrophying unused ones, is a glorified flexible analogue switching system. The same could be said for any digital switch.

 

"Oh look, when this switch turns from 0 to 1, literally speaking, the structure is different and therefore I've created a new construct!" is a very naïve way of looking at any circuit, including the brain. You don't change any of the empathy circuitry in your brain at any time to being used for sight or sound processing. You don't change any of the underlying logic involved, at all.

 

You would not switch on a kettle and say it is a different machine than when it was off because its circuitry has entered a different state. That's all a tulpa is. Different settings.

[TurboSimmie]

It's really interesting and kind of funny that all the best scientists in the world couldn't create a human brain...but a man and woman in the bedroom can. 🤭 Science still has nothing on nature!

[Glaurung26]

*smirk* 😏