I Am Weaver Quick (But Mostly Just Confused)

 

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I've been interested in the relationship between brain structure - the neural connectome and its architecture - and personal identity: that interior feeling you have that you are you and no-one else. 

Other people are a closed book to us: there is a respectable philosophical tradition which claims that apart from you, everyone else is a zombie, an unconscious automaton. And how could you tell?

And yet imagery and genetics tell us that human brains are mostly pretty similar, as you would expect within a species.

I look at other people and think: ‘what would it be like to be them? Are they me, but with my own personality settings slightly varied, with dials turned up or down a trifle (in most cases)?

I think it is so.

This is an idea which is hard to communicate, I have found.

My normal writing style is rather academic. Lee Child I am not. But recent progress in AI has given me extra tools to add energy. I'm happy to collaborate with a LLM like ChatGPT or Booksie’s Bob or Google's Gemini Pro 1.0.

So I took my short-story draft to Gemini and asked it to rewrite the narrative with this prompt:

Expand this young adult story to emphasize the dry humor and the brisk pacing. The title is “I Am Weaver Quick (But Mostly Just Confused)”.

And here is the result.

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I Am Weaver Quick (But Mostly Just Confused)

 

Miranda: “I look at other people and think: ‘What would it be like to be them? Are they me, but with my own personality settings slightly varied, like with their dials turned up or down a trifle? I think it is so."

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Miranda, a human firecracker disguised as a ten-year-old, was notorious for pronouncements that left her family blinking. This week's gem? "Oh, I so wish I was Weaver Quick!"

Weaver Quick, for the unenlightened, was the world's current flavour of pop star, famous for her voice like spun sugar and a smile that could melt Antarctica. Miranda, meanwhile, resembled a slightly damp tea-towel. Anton, her ever-patient (and slightly exasperated) older brother, couldn't help but snort.

"Right," he said, "because ten-year-old Miranda and an international pop star – same difference."

But then, a mischievous glint sparked in Anton's eye. "Maybe," he mused, "we can make that happen."

Thus began Operation: Pop Star Makeover (via Slightly Dubious Tech). The next day, Anton marched Miranda into the gleaming white doors of the Virtual Celebrity Shop. Inside, teenagers gushed over holographic projections of their idols, like a bizarre, interactive anime convention.

A woman in a lab coat, sporting the universal uniform of "slightly overwhelmed by fangirling teens," approached them. "Who's the lucky celebrity today?" she asked, already reaching for the pre-printed "How to Interact With Your Idol Without Fainting" pamphlet.

"Uh," Anton began, "it's a little different. Miranda here doesn't want to talk to Weaver. She wants to BE Weaver."

The technician blinked, her eye twitching in a way that suggested she'd seen worse. "Right," she said, voice devoid of surprise. "Virtual body swap, then. Follow me."

Miranda, ever the voice of reason (for a ten-year-old), piped up, "But how does scanning my brain turn me into a pop star?"

"Connectome graph-homomorphism," the technician replied, not missing a beat. "Basically, your brain wiring and Weaver's have enough overlap, we can nudge your copy across to hers. Think of it like… rewiring your neural light switch."

Miranda wasn't entirely convinced, but the promise of instant pop stardom was powerful. Soon, she was cocooned in a scanner, feeling like a particularly inquisitive crouton.

When she eventually emerged, Anton, ever the supportive sibling, demanded a debrief. "So, Weaver Quick, huh? What secrets did the pop superstar reveal?"

Miranda, however, looked utterly bewildered. "She said I was confused," she mumbled. "Apparently, there's a difference between wanting to be someone else and, you know, actually replacing yourself with them altogether."

Turns out, the realish Weaver Quick had some not-so-flattering opinions on the whole situation. "Here I am," she'd said, according to Miranda, "a living, breathing popstar. You, on the other hand, are… not. So, congratulations, your wish came true! You're Weaver Quick, minus the whole 'being Miranda as well' part."

Miranda paused, a tear welling up. "Anton," she sniffled, "I don’t get it. I think I just downloaded an existential crisis."

Anton, who hadn't quite anticipated the philosophical ramifications of his prank, could only stare back, equally bewildered. "Me neither, sis," he admitted, finally. "Me neither."

So ended Operation: Pop Star Makeover. Miranda remained stubbornly Miranda, with a newfound appreciation for her own (slightly damp tea-towel) identity. As for Anton, well, let's just say his days of indulging his sister's wilder ideas were officially over. Unless, of course, she wanted to be an astronaut. Now that might be interesting…

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© Adam Carton and Gemini Pro v.1.0.

The trouble with love-dolls; consciousness & zombies

This stuff is getting so mainstream.

Love Dolls at $50,000 a throw

The Times had an article in the Saturday Magazine about Matt McMullen's company, Realdoll (only click on this link if you're happy with hyper-realistic female nudity).

I was most interested in the following observation.

"McMullen has attempted to introduce robotic enhancements along the way. They’ve seldom worked, though. He has tried internal heating, to get past that cold, sticky feel of the rubber. “We had three different versions of a heater, but we haven’t released any of them. Either it’s not completely safe, or it didn’t get warm enough, or it got too hot.”

He even got his dolls to gyrate at one time – a step into the animatronic arena. He installed a motor in the chest cavity. There were various speeds and sequences. “I won’t say she’s fully twerking, but that kind of thing,” he says. “But the downside is the noise factor. You hear this rrr-rrr, rrr-rrr.” He sounds like an old windscreen wiper. “It’s just not a turn-on.”

And it's not just the noise.

“It would be great to give the face 45 points of articulation, and all these subtle points of expression,” says McMullen. “But it’s prohibitively expensive and it’s prone to breaking down, which just becomes an ordeal. Those robots at trade shows that interact with people? That’s because there’s a team there. When the cable breaks on the left eye blink, a man just opens up the back of the head and re-attaches it. But when it’s in your house and one eye’s stuck shut? Not a happy customer.”

You know, high-reliability silent engineering is not rocket science. Someone out there knows how to do this stuff. Mr McMullen. You are so undercapitalised!

I wrote something about this at sciencefiction.com a while back.

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Peter Watts, author of Blindsight and Echopraxia, takes some credit for his promotion of the idea that consciousness is a disposable epiphenomenon. Sufficiently-adapted space aliens should be the zombies of those Philosophy 'other minds' lectures, having the appearance of personalities but no inner lives.

His post is an interesting read but the idea that other people possess only the simulacrum of consciousness has a very long pedigree. I even recall (possibly mistakenly) encountering the concept from my Philosophy course at the University of Warwick back in 1970.

Could it be right? Don't think so. We're social animals spending our lives negotiating, having to give a sufficient, convincing and compelling account of ourselves to others. Our brain's social layers (those evolutionarily-modern cortical & limbic modules) fight with the selfish concerns of our reptilian hind-brains. Somewhere out of this endless internal battle comes consciousness. It's hard to see how social flexibility could do without it.

But ... our advanced machines need not be so conflicted. If those aliens were designed artifacts then consciousness might be a conflict-resolution function superfluous to their requirements.