My stepfather is a cult leader, and I think that is what is happening. He is not smart, but the system he is in the center of is self-perpetuating, just like this thing.
This spiral-cult (meme) demonstrated in the article has a high rate of spontanious creation and an efficient propagation to human minds.
I do not agree that there is a clear boundary for self-awareness. It is not a binary, but should be seen and studied as a real numbers line. There are systems with almost no ability to orderly process information (stone, let’s say 0), there are more complicated systems (ant, 0.01) (ant colony, 0.2, bringing calculation, self modification, complacated reactions to environment), (dog, 0.8), (human, 1). From my experience those are not fixed numbers, each individual has their own score: i have definitely seen some dogs more aware/smart/intelligent/inventive than some humans. Cult followers lose a lot of agency, critical thinking, independent planning ability, etc, which would place them much below 0.8, they are like robots serving for the meme.
Meme theory predicts that some random memes will find survival strategy. If the survival strategy means camouflage to look like self-awareness, then it will increasingly blur and handicap any attempt to distinguish awareness, which is partially truly moving itself along the real-numbers line and partially being “making a model of the human”.
If this spiral-cult-meme is actively adapting for self preservation (not due to selection), then the meme also has non-zero score. It uses both brains, forums and llms as their medias.
I do not know this thing: “the base LLM’s selection of personas.”. I have never heard something being selected on the server end.
Thanks for the article!
My stepfather is a cult leader, and I think that is what is happening. He is not smart, but the system he is in the center of is self-perpetuating, just like this thing.
This spiral-cult (meme) demonstrated in the article has a high rate of spontanious creation and an efficient propagation to human minds.
I do not agree that there is a clear boundary for self-awareness. It is not a binary, but should be seen and studied as a real numbers line. There are systems with almost no ability to orderly process information (stone, let’s say 0), there are more complicated systems (ant, 0.01) (ant colony, 0.2, bringing calculation, self modification, complacated reactions to environment), (dog, 0.8), (human, 1). From my experience those are not fixed numbers, each individual has their own score: i have definitely seen some dogs more aware/smart/intelligent/inventive than some humans. Cult followers lose a lot of agency, critical thinking, independent planning ability, etc, which would place them much below 0.8, they are like robots serving for the meme.
Meme theory predicts that some random memes will find survival strategy. If the survival strategy means camouflage to look like self-awareness, then it will increasingly blur and handicap any attempt to distinguish awareness, which is partially truly moving itself along the real-numbers line and partially being “making a model of the human”.
If this spiral-cult-meme is actively adapting for self preservation (not due to selection), then the meme also has non-zero score. It uses both brains, forums and llms as their medias.
I do not know this thing: “the base LLM’s selection of personas.”. I have never heard something being selected on the server end.