The experience has been made, and is generally classified—with good reason—as “torture”. Solitary confinement is one step of it. We may wonder about absolute sensory deprivation—suspended within a tank of liquid at body temperature, no sound, nothing. I’d expect the nervous system to go haywire.
I expect the CIA / NSA already have used it for experiments and interrogations… and I went to check, and of course. How not? Check this out: “Total deprivation of feeling (sensory deprivation) during CIA/NSA interrogations is a form of psychological torture designed to break a detainee’s willpower by creating a state of profound mental and physical disorientation. When a person is removed from all environmental stimuli—usually by being placed in absolute darkness, silence, and isolation (often wearing headphones, blacked-out goggles, and diapers)—the brain attempts to fill the void, often leading to a breakdown akin to psychosis within days. ”
This is an excellent piece of work and I believe correct in a fundamental, multi-dimensional way. I’ve been writing on exactly this—the geometric structure that emerges from these interconnected algorithms and what it means for what’s running inside these systems. These algorithms you’re talking about—these “programs”—are not simple “hello world”. They are algorithms that pick on the results of other algorithms. The entire LLMs is seeded with these, aligned in multi-dimensional space and vitally, they connect to one another. You have these in “layers” or manifolds, and they make use of one another. This creates a fundamental geometric structure which guides the apparent cognition these models generate. It also explains their long-range and multiple-prompt coherence in reasoning, because the geometric structure is constraining the local randomness and guiding it along a coherent path.