Spotlight vs Lamplight
Awareness and AI
You may have come across the terms ‘spotlight’ and ‘lamplight’ awareness.
They give an idea of the different kinds of focus we can bring to bear.
‘Spotlight’ consciousness is perhaps the one we are most familiar with. The idea of intensive focus on one small aspect, immersion in a specific task, detailed study of a particular subject.
Back when I wrote code by hand, I found it often to be intensely spotlight activity. I could spend hours in flow state, working with the detailed intricacy of the code and it’s dependencies, wrestling with syntax and mapping out modules in clear and concise ways.
Drugs can shift our states of consciousness, and for me caffeine has always been one that helps me get into spotlight mode, A strong cup of coffee before a coding session would often help me really get into ‘the zone’.
It’s an experience, for a variety of reasons, I no longer have very often, and honestly, I still miss it.
Lamplight awareness is different.
Rather than focused and constrained, it is expansive.
Instead of examining the intricate pattern on a leaf, it is appreciating the whole tree; how it sways in the breeze, the quality of dappled light through the branches, the tinge of sadness in the autumn as the leaves fall or the zest and excitement of spring blossoms.
The leaf is still present, those intricacies there if you look, but you lose something if you do: the bigger picture, a quality of the whole that is something other, perhaps something more, than any of the composite individual pieces.
I am no expert in psychedelic drugs, but my limited understanding is that they can lead to greater lamplight states of consciousness.
AI is functionally a spotlight consciousness. It works within limited context windows, and the tighter and more clearly defined the task, the narrower the spotlight, the better it tends to perform.
In some sense, you could argue it is also the ultimate lamplight consciousness too, trained as it is on the entire corpus of human experience available in digital form. Some also hope that by combining all these instances together you get a form of ultimate awareness, spotlight and lamplight simultaneously, AGI.
I don’t know whether this will come to pass. But for now, and I believe at least a while to come, true lamplight awareness will remain the preserve of humans.
We are far more than the individual biological components that make us up; we experience more than the data of our five senses; we understand and communicate in ways we are often not even fully aware of. No AI can be trained on our minds eye.
AI excels at spotlight tasks, and will only continue to improve at them.
That leaves the lamplight to us.
May it carry us forward, through the darkness of uncertainty, to a brighter future.
It's becoming clear that with all the brain and consciousness theories out there, the proof will be in the pudding. By this I mean, can any particular theory be used to create a human adult level conscious machine. My bet is on the late Gerald Edelman's Extended Theory of Neuronal Group Selection. The lead group in robotics based on this theory is the Neurorobotics Lab at UC at Irvine. Dr. Edelman distinguished between primary consciousness, which came first in evolution, and that humans share with other conscious animals, and higher order consciousness, which came to only humans with the acquisition of language. A machine with only primary consciousness will probably have to come first.
What I find special about the TNGS is the Darwin series of automata created at the Neurosciences Institute by Dr. Edelman and his colleagues in the 1990's and 2000's. These machines perform in the real world, not in a restricted simulated world, and display convincing physical behavior indicative of higher psychological functions necessary for consciousness, such as perceptual categorization, memory, and learning. They are based on realistic models of the parts of the biological brain that the theory claims subserve these functions. The extended TNGS allows for the emergence of consciousness based only on further evolutionary development of the brain areas responsible for these functions, in a parsimonious way. No other research I've encountered is anywhere near as convincing.
I post because on almost every video and article about the brain and consciousness that I encounter, the attitude seems to be that we still know next to nothing about how the brain and consciousness work; that there's lots of data but no unifying theory. I believe the extended TNGS is that theory. My motivation is to keep that theory in front of the public. And obviously, I consider it the route to a truly conscious machine, primary and higher-order.
My advice to people who want to create a conscious machine is to seriously ground themselves in the extended TNGS and the Darwin automata first, and proceed from there, by applying to Jeff Krichmar's lab at UC Irvine, possibly. Dr. Edelman's roadmap to a conscious machine is at https://arxiv.org/abs/2105.10461, and here is a video of Jeff Krichmar talking about some of the Darwin automata, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J7Uh9phc1Ow