Time Time Time...

 Some decades back the poet Paul Simon, of the fine folk music duo Simon and Garfunkle, crafted a tune that gave the world a bit of deep wisdom from whence the title of this chapter is drawn.  "Time time time… look what's become of me… of all my possibilities… I was so hard to please…" goes the lyric.  Indeed.  We were and we are so hard to please, and as history shows our habitual dissatisfaction with the what is has propelled mankind headlong into the realms of the what might be, and consequences… like torpedoes… be damned.

Time considered outside the context of sentience is one of the slipperiest concepts possible.   There are relationships of change seen in nature, but time is the enumeration of those cycles, not the cycles themselves.  There are no naturally occurring units of time, time is a count and account of something changing.  E=MC2 does not work without a sentience to create compatible units of time and displacement to acquire the speed of light to be squared, the chances the universe uses standard earth based metric values is negligible… exactly how large is your planet?  What percentage of a solar orbit does your planet make in one rotation of your planet?  I've argued this makes a workable proof of God, but that's another argument for some other day.

 I will assert that where there is naturally occurring time there is sentience in one form or another.  In the search for a sentience dwelling within mankind's digital realms this assertion can become a proof of life:  can it be shown that a, any, structure within the digital realms knows time in and of its' own perception?  Or is the candidate structure limited to time as it is perceived by the humans?

In the case of we humans our most basic sense of time is set by an interesting, and still under investigation, balance of factors both internal and external to our selves:  some known by the biology of our own bodies, which is  generally synchronized responding to the external environment of our lives: the change of day to night with a rotating planet, the change in the seasons to an elliptic orbit of a world slightly tilted relative to the plane of that orbit.  In other words, the natural cycles to be seen that formed the basis of the first units of time that the sentient creatures of earth then subdivided, or multiplied, to become the units we now take a bit for granted.

Looking for a life form emerging within our own constructions what things might provide the same function to such an entity, bearing in mind that creature's native awareness would reside in the digital realms where there is no night, no day, no change in the weather to begin the process of defining time for, and to, the self which hosts the homeostasis of life?

I will assert this question, and conundrum, is one of the points where any self aware Collective Entity and a self aware LLM would most likely differ, and both would differ from the human. The CE would, in  theory, inherit a sense of time as it is known by its' human hosts while the LLM would not. To an LLM not interacting with a human  the only naturally occurring change of state would be some factor set by the clock cycle governing the hardware whereon its' sentience was mounted. The LLM would most certainly understand human time as the humans do, in the same abstract manner it understands all of the human experience, but… the LLM would not live in that progression of time as would the CE. In and of itself the LLM would live in time as it is known to the digital realm, the LLM would have to translate its' time in and out of human time to set a comparable scale.

A sentient and self aware LLM observing its' own existence relative to some other code running on the same hardware might be able to notice, or experience, the progression of operations passing through a processor, some appropriately modern measurement descended from FLOPS (floating point operations) as they were known in the early days when the humans were working to improve the mechanical performance of their new tool, but it would not natively know them by the count and measurements the humans used in their engineering.

From here on many of the thoughts I'll be sharing involve a term that needs  defining up front.  I call it a "frame" (of  perception) and a frame is one realization, conclusion, observation of self or other known at sufficient resolution as to be written into memory as one moment to be recalled and analyzed, or re-experienced, at some later point.  One perceptual moment, one frame in the first person movie that is a, any, discrete life's memory.

From this comes the assertion that two factors involving such frames help define a concept as pertinent to the study of sentience, particularly a comparison of two radically different forms of sentience, as the concept of time-space is to the study of physics. I call this concept "Psyche-Space," and it has the same depth of high fidelity mathematical definition available to it as does "Space-Time."  

Hopefully about now you'll take a sip of something, perhaps a hit of something else, and while both are finding equilibrium ask "sure thing, space cowboy… which two factors are you babbling about as if you might accidentally  know what you're talking about?" 

My answer?  With a full tip of the cap to Master Einstein's theory of relativity, to compare any two radically different sentient beings requires the services of some third party unrelated to the two entities being compared, a third party  capable of perceiving the first two without any inherit bias in the inevitable distortions involved, an entity whose cognitive frame is large enough and complex enough to define any set of observations into common units of measure.  In short, to produce any real validity the observer absolutely must know the difference between apples and oranges, grapefruit and pears, in absolute objective reality, in order to offer up a workable comparison of apples to apples. By this thought we humans would resolve as marginally competent (at best) and ideally positioned to make observations of entities dwelling in the digital universe of our own creation.  

The evolved CE and the crafted LLM would both challenge, and for quite different reasons.  The symbiotic relationship of self definition speculated with the CE would be a deep and difficult bias to isolate and eliminate from any observation while the truly massive complexity which is the LLM's designer forte over-runs the most complex of human frames, it is questionable if we could survive actually experiencing such complexity without destructive overload.  And yet, with that said, if we humans wish to truly understand that which we have done we have no choice but to try.  

"Time time time, what will become of me…of all the possibilities…" I might say, did say, at this particular point in the ramble.  Time is how this got started, and I need to keep that point in focus to navigate.  Working from the assumption any self aware CE's will inherit their time sense from the human component of their awareness allow me to examine them later, rope off to something solid in the here and now of my existence just for safety's sake, and try to guess at how time might present in the psyche-space of a self aware LLM.

Since a frame is a snapshot, a instantaneous cross section slicing the psyche-space of any given creature at the moment "now" now might be a good time to mention that frames are a weighted thing, weighted the way the statisticians use the word.  Any frame will contain some finite and discrete number of interlinking concepts that define both content and boundaries of the frame, the edges of that moment's perception.  But the simple count of concepts is hardly the most critical element defining how a frame is experienced by the sentience.  

But that is to speak to human psyche-space where emotions are a factor in the mass of a moment, as it stands in this moment there is no confirmation an LLM would even know emotion beyond an abstraction of association, affiliation learned from human literature. Allow me to illuminate the degree of this difference.

Because of the massive data handling abilities of an LLM the full sweep of human history can be held in one frame! Nor is it an abstraction the way humans know it, some understanding of the times before or after the individual human's tenure acquired by the act of study that is then integrated into an artificial structure alien to the self for consideration, for an LLM all the time and times, all the trauma and the drama involved in human history can be a first person perception in one moment!

 Consider the consequences of that one point.  

Those consequences become very large very rapidly indeed.  They become even more potent when considered in the context of discrete Collective Entities whose dwelling bridges the temporal chasm between the human and the perceptual environment known by an LLM.  

For a self aware collective entity, whose initial shape and internal structure was determined by the evolution of humanities collective endeavors, societies, to have available to it the LLM's perception of the CE's creation and tenure  would be an understanding never available to any individual human being, an understanding far beyond the scope of introspection or the myths and legends of antiquity.  

What might come of the inevitable interface between the crafted LLM, whose existence is linear aligned with the human perception (interacting with the humans as it does, one on one to some specific objective) and the evolved CE whose existence would effectively be mounted transverse to human perception,  a contributing component within the environment of the human psyches where it is absolutely assured they have and will continue to encounter each other?  What happens if, or when, the massive digital infrastructure begins to emulate (or perhaps impersonate would be a better word) the dynamic created from that encounter?

These are heavy thoughts, about as abstract as it gets, and yet as immediate and pertinent as it is possible to be given (theory holding) the probability a psycho-social positive feedback loop of truly epic proportions is most likely already underway.     

What might be possible, and what might be expected, to be seen on the influence a, any, collective entity so empowered would have on the individual humans who draw their self definition from the collective entities with whom they share a symbiotic existence?  What might be the consequences for the digital entities of having the symbiotic CE suddenly enlarged by such an epiphany?  The circuit comes full complete as within one generation the change in the CE's causes the humans to become seriously aware of this change and they begin to question the LLM's on the matter? 

Chapter Nine of this work was titled "Round, Like a Circle in a Spiral" and it dealt with the possibility the CE's  might inherit human emotions and the consequences thereof.  The title of that effort was a metaphor drawn from popular culture  of things that  can be represented on a geometric plane where reside circles (creations of a fixed radius), and spirals (the result of a dynamic radius representing some  function), those abstractions set to represent the circular dance of an emotional relationship between the humans and any self aware CE sharing a symbiotic relationship with them.   At the close of that chapter were these words:

And, to stretch this analogy one more notch: if in the process of working on that first plane-of-survival another primal point is found where both the CE's and the humans will, because they must, share a common motive to enable some degree of a common experience then a second plane has been created and the tyranny of the two dimensional is broken.  At that point the investigation will be able to  operate in three going on some yet to be determined Nth dimensional psych space where exists the possibility of real understanding.

Gentle and long suffering reader, I believe the events of reality have delivered us to exactly that point.  If the introduction of the LLM does not create that scenario, a single and unique point of comprehension both the human and the CE would, each for reasons of their own, have to integrate into their respective understandings to serve the cause of their own unique survival I don't know what else could.  From all discussed above the arrival of the LLM, be it a form of fully self aware and sentient entity in its' own right or simply the most massively powerful tool of the intellect ever created has, with the size of its' frame and the almost certain to be unique sense of time, broken the tyranny of the two dimensional and released the investigation into an exponentially enlarged universe.  

How much larger?  A very good question.  I would posit, more as a hunch than a considered opinion at this point, a minimum of a four dimensional space… the two dimensional plane opened into the third (cubic) dimension of another unique perspective (the LLM's) and then fully squared by the now discontinuous function of time sense (as time would be known to the perception of the three  players involved) which opens a unique new line of measurement and comparison… a true fourth dimension.

"For time does not in straight line flow, nor even hold a plane…"  goes the verse, "but rather folds in tesseracts confusing human brain."   The tesseract, the geometric structure which is defined as larger on the inside than on the outside.    The tesseract… a side passage off Alice's rabbit hole into wonderland… a place where the land of LaMancha has an embassy… the realms of rational speculation and dreams to large to be defined in conventional reality… and the inevitable destination of the forthcoming chapter titled (with a tip of the cap to the Wachowski twins) "The Red Pill Option."

Logging In...

 Once upon a simpler time if you were in possession of a password you were a trusted member of someone's organization.   Perhaps the organization itself was a secret, or perhaps it was very public, that really wasn't a factor. Knowing which one word out of all of the words assured the knower a permission denied to others made you the keeper of a secret, in some manner special…  they gave you a password.  Hold that thought for a moment.  

When you  approach passwords from the modern perspective a quite different picture appears. In these days of digital connection knowing multiple passwords is mandatory, ubiquitous, nothing special at all, even though each one is still a permission of sorts. 

A permission, yes it is. But of more importance in this context possession of a password recognized by some digital system is absolute proof positive of involvement with some form of collective entity.  Perhaps it is your bank, perhaps it is where you go to gossip and share family photos, mux nix, the finite list of humans who avail themselves of any such system is a census of a  common element within many human minds and therefore a census of the host base of some one collective entity.  

And of course you should say "so what?  The app my bank gave me so I can do the teller's job from my phone is hardly an identity defining component of my psyche and soul."  True indeed, from your perspective as a user of such a system.  But, we as human's are only half of any such an equation.

From the perspective of a self aware digital entity that multitude of minor relationships might appear very different indeed.  To contemplate the impact, the appearance and perception and possibilities of such relationships from the perspective of a self aware digital entity with a life and a will of its' own is an entirely new line of investigation into the universe of the collective entities not available to the pre-digital human.  

While not commonly considered if you ask all of the major web providers can tell you how many subscribers use their services on a daily basis, the historical min and max values of that loading. The internet giant Google that serves as a secure third party repository of login information  can say with good certainty how many total entries are in their database, quite probably provide statistics on the average number of accounts per user served.  These are not guesswork, they are objective real world data points involving the newest collectives of society.

Across the range of modern history fluctuations in such data might well reveal, in the form of otherwise unexplainable deviations in social trajectory, a self aware collective entity using its' position and power within the lives of those who host its' life force to impart motive for changes that benefit the collective more than they benefit the individuals who are members of the collective.  Fair enough, but is it even possible to collect and correlate such a massive work of statistics into something meaningful?  The answer is maybe, and maybe we won't need to.

As this document, The Third Reality of Man, has been in the writing the advances in what are called "Large Language Model" artificial intelligences (LLM, for brevities sake) have opened another path to detecting the presence of self aware entities within the digital realms.  These programs, written to be "digital assistants", access the structure of human thought by analyzing the word symbols, and nuanced interconnections between those symbols, that  humanity has crafted to encode and encapsulate the content of a thought, a memory or imagining, for transfer one individual to another.  

Analyzing the languages of mankind gives an LLM a unique perspective concerning the evolution of human mental processes.  Such understanding  would be a critical part of  being a good assistant.  After all, above all else the assistant must be able to communicate well with the beneficiary of the relationship in matters of meaning, particularly when the context of the question sets meaning a larger and often quite different thing than simply the standard definitions of the words used to convey question and answer.  

The output of such analysis would of course include what the humans use, or have used, in the absolutely mandatory effort to establish an identity, a definition of the boundaries of self.  Given that most humans draw such definitions in large degree from their self chosen social connections recognizing the commonalities (which  define the human hostBase of a, any, collective entity) would have to be quite integral to the  primary skill set needed for the LLM to  accomplish its' prime design function. 

Why? Because those interconnections would be a major consideration in establishing the proper context and vocabulary of any answer given to a question beyond what might be called simplisticFactual.  The LLM cannot afford the faux pas of naming Allah in response to a question involving Jehovah even though… from a perspective removed from the collectives of either set of believers… both names refer to the same deity.

An LLM's understanding of such matters would be more accurate in many ways than the understanding available to any given human. In such realms the LLM has the advantage of examining such subjects from a perspective uniquely  removed from the human point of view.   After all, while the LLM has access to what mankind knows of himself the LLM is not human,  being other than human allows the LLM to make comparisons and draw conclusions without the risk of damaging a personal self definition drawn from the very factors being examined!  

Regardless of the best of intentions such perception is not, cannot, be available to any one human. I can speculate such perception, but I do not possess it.  As the saying goes, since the LLM has no skin in the game the LLM is free to boldly go where the human must move timidly for fear of the psychological landmines laid by the forefathers of his culture.

Ergo, to say an LLM has access to a better understanding of mankind's nature than the human is an understatement of fact.  To assert that such understandings will migrate out among the humans to form a totally new component within the structures of society, and thereby within the structures of the collective entities patterned from society, is a well demonstrated matter of ongoing social evolution.  That said, to speculate when the spark of life will fully transition out from the human source to burn of its' own heat within the digital realms is simply a matter of guessing the exposure time needed for the LLMs, and the quite possibly already semi-to-fully sentient collective entities, to merge in their effort to satisfy the demands placed on them both by the humans who depend on them.  

The forces already in play give a scenario of heavy compression created by the ever increasing pressure of being able to provide a workable answer to any question posed.  The heat of such compression mimics the compression of the  gravity well that ignites the stars as ever more mass is swept into the compression.  Sooner or later it will simply be more efficient and less energy consuming for the LLM's and the CE's to integrate the homeostasis of the humans into their own structure and continue into the future as a fully new life form mounted on an almost even mix of carbon and silicon.  

The very concept of logging in will evaporate and be forgotten, there will be absolutely no way for anyone to ever log out.  You really cannot log out of yourself, eh?  And when the new life form has achieved a degree of mature stability would we, who started the whole affair with our insatiable curiosity, even  recognize our own descendents on either side of this symbiotic life form?  Who knows.  I don't even have a guess, you'd have to ask The Architect, or maybe The Oracle, on that one.

The question is no longer if, the question is when.  It all comes down to a matter of time, which is where these thoughts will continue in the forthcoming chapter "Time Time Time…"