Kickstarting the audio version of the upcoming book "The Sequences"

Hi, Yes, for the kickstarter option, that seems to be almost a requirement. People have to see what they are asked to invest in.

The kickstarter option is somewhat my second choice plan, or I'd be furher along on that already. I have several things going on that are pulling me in different directions.

To expand just a bit on the evolution of my You Tube idea: originally – a couple months before I recognized more poignantly the value to the HLAI R & D community of doing well-designed, issue-sophisticated, genuinely useful (to other than a naïve audience) interviews with other thinkers and researchers -- I had already decided to create a You Tube (hereafter, 'YT') channel of my own. This one will have a different, though complimentary, emphasis.

This (first) YT channel will present a concentrated video course (perhaps 20 to 30 presentations in the plan I have, with more to grown in as audience demand or reaction dictates.) The course presentations, with myself at the whiteboard, graphics, video clips, whatever can help make it both enjoyable and more comprehensible, will consist of what are essential ideas and concepts, that are not only of use to people working in creating HLAI (and above), but are so important that they constitute essential background, without which, I believe, people creating HLAI are at least partly floundering in the dark.

The value add for this course comes from several things. I do have a gift for exposition. My time as a tutor and writer has demonstrated to me (from my audiences) that I have a good talent for playing my own devil's advocate, listening and watching through audience ears and eyes, and getting inside the intuitions likely to occur in the listener. When I was a math tutor in college, I always did that from the outset, and was always complimented for it. My experience with studying this for decades and debating it, metabolizing all the useful points of view on the issues that I have studied – while always trying to push forward to find what is really true – allows me to gather many perspectives together, anticipate the standard objections or misunderstandings, and help people with less experience navigate the issues. I have an unusual mix of accumulated areas of expertise -- software development, neuroscience, philosophy, physics – which contributes to the ability to see and synthesize productive paths that might (and have) been missed elsewhere. Perspective – enough time seeing intellectual fads come and go, to recognize how they worked even “before my time.” Unless one sees – and can critique or free oneself from – contextual assumptions, one is likely to be entrained within conceptual expernalities that define the universe of discourse, possibly pruning away preemptively any chance for genuine progress and novel ideas. Einstein, Crick and Watson, Heisenberg and Bohr, all were able to think new thoughts and entertain new possibilities.

Like someone just posted in Less Wrong, you have a certain number of weirdness points, spend them wisely. People in the grips of an intellectual trance who don't even know they are pruning away anything, cannot muster either the courage, or the creativity, to have any weirdness points to spend.

For example. Apparently, very few people understand the context and intellectual climate … the formative “conceptual externalities” that permeated the intellectual ether at the time Turing proposed his “imitation game.”

I alluded to some of these contextual elements of what – then – was the intellectual culture, without providing any kind of exposition (in other words, just making the claim in passing), in my dual message to you and Luke, earlier today (Friday.)

That kind of thing – were it to be explained rigorously, articulately, engagingly -- is a mild eye-opening moment to a lot of people (I have explained it before to people who are very sure of themselves, who went away changed by the knowledge.) I can open the door to questioning what seems like such a “reasonable dogma”, i.e. that an “imitation game” is all there is, and all there rationally could be, to the question of, and criteria for, human-equivalent mentality.

Neuroscience, as I wrote in the Bostrom forum a couple weeks ago (perhaps a bit too stridently in tone, and not to my best credit, in that case) is no longer held in the spell of the dogma that being “rational” and “scientific” means banishing consciousness from our investigation.

Neither should we be. Further, I am convinced that if we dig a little deeper, we CAN come up with a replacement for the Turing test (but first we have to be willing to look!) … some difference that makes a difference, and actually develop some (at least probabilistic) test(s) for whether a system that behaves intelligently, has, in addition, consciousness.

So, this video course will be a combination of selected topics in scientific intellectual history that are essential to understand, in order to see where we have come from, and then will develop current and new ideas, so see where we might go.

I have a developing theory with elements that seem very promising. It is more than elements, it is becoming, by degrees, a system of related ideas that fit together perfectly, are partly based on accepted scientific results, and are partly extensions that a strong, rational case can be made for.

What is becoming interesting and exciting to me about the extensions, is that sometime during the last year (and I work on this every day, unless I am exhausted from a previous day and need to rest), the individual insights, which were exciting enough individually, and independently arguable, are starting to reveal a systematic cluster of concepts that all fit together.

This is extremely exciting, even a little scary at times. But suddenly, it is as if a lifetime of work and piecemeal study, with a new insight here, another insight there, a possible route of investigation elsewhere... all are fitting into a mosaic.

So, to begin with the point I began with, my time is pulling me in various directions. I am in the Bostrom forum, but on days that I am hot on the scent of another layer of this theory that is being born, I have to follow that. I do a lot of dictation when the ideas are coming quickly.

It is, of course, very complicated. But it will also be quite explainable, with systematic, orderly presentation.

So, that was the original plan for my own YT channel. It was to begin with essential intellectual history in physics, philosophy of mind, early AI, language comprehension, knowledge representation, formal semantics.... and that ball of interrelated concepts that set, to an extent, either correct or incorrect boundary conditions on what a theory has to look like.

Then my intent was to carefully present and argue for (and take devils advocate for) my new insights, one by one, then as a system.

I don't know how it will turn out, or whether I will suddenly discover a dead end. But assuming no dead end, I want it out there where interested theorists can see it and judge it on its merits, up or down, or modify it.

I am going to tun out of word allowance any moment. But it was after planning this, that I thought of the opportunity to do interviews of other thinkers for possibly someone else's YT channel. Both projects are obviously compatible. More later as interest dictates, I have to make dinner. Best, Tom NxGenSentience

I didn't exactly say that, or at least, didn't intend to exactly say that. It's correct of you to ask for that clarification.

When I say "vindicated the theory", that was, admittedly, pretty vague.

What I should have said was the recent experiments removed what has been more or less statistically the most common and continuing objection to the theory, by showing that quantum effects in microtubules, under the kind of environmental conditons that are relevant, can indeed be maintained long enough for quantum processes to "run their course" in a manner that, according to Hameroff and Penrose, makes a difference that can propogate causally to a level that is of significance to the organism.

Now, as to "decision making". I am honestly NOT trying to be coy here, but that is not entirely a transparent phrase. I would have to take a couple thousand words to unpack that (not obfuscate, but unpack), and depending on this and that, and which sorts of decisions (conscious or preconscious, highly attended or habituated and automatic), the answer could be yes or no... that is, even given that consciousness "lights up" under the influence of microtubule-dependent processes like Orch OR suggests -- admittedly something that, per se, is a further condition, for which quantum coherence within the microtubule regime is a necessary but not sufficient condition.

But the latter is plausible so many people, given a pile of other suggestive evidence. The deal breaker has always been the can or can't quantum coherence be maintained in the stated environs.

Orch OR is a very multifaceted theory, as you know, and I should not have said "vindicated" without very careful qualification. Removing a stumbling block is not proof of truth, of a theory with so many moving parts.

I do think, as a physiological theory of brain function, it has a lot of positives (some from vectors of increasing plausibility coming in from other directions, theorists and experiments) and the removal of the most commonly cited objection, on the basis of which many people have claimed Orch OR is a non-starter, is a pretty big deal.

Hameroff is not a wild-eyed speculator (and I am not suggesting that you are claiming he is.)

I find him interesting and worthy of close attention, in part because has accumulated an enormous amount of evidence for microtubule effects, and he knows the math, and presents it regularly.

I first read his Biomolecular Mind hardback book, back in the early 90's, which he actually wrote in the late 80's, at which time he had already amassed quite a bit of empiracle study regarding the role of microtubules in neurons, and in creatures whithout neurons, posessing only microtubules, that exhibit intelligent behavior.

Other experiments in various quarters over quite a few recent years (though there are still those neurobiologists who do disagree) have on the whole seemed to validate Hameroff's claim that it is quantum effects -- not "ordinry" synapse-level effects that can be described without use of the quantum level of description -- that are responsible for anaesthesia's effects on consciousness, in living brains.

Again, not a proof of Orch OR, but an indication that Hameroff is, perhaps, on to some kind of right track.

I do think that evidence is accumulating, from what I have seen in PubMed and elsewhere, that microtubule effects at least partially modulate dendritic computations, and seem to mediate the rapid remodeling of the dendritic tree (spines come and go with amazing rapidity), making it likely that the "integrate and fire" mechanism involves microtubule computation, at least in some cases.

I have seen, for example, experiments that give microtubule corrupting enzymes to some, but not control, neurons and observe dendritic tree behavior. Microtubules are in the loop in learning, attention, etc. Quantum effects in MTs.... evidence seems to grow by the month.

But, to your ending question, I would have to say what I said... which amounts to "sometimes yes, sometimes no," and in the 'yes' cases, not necessarily for the reasons that Hameroff thinks, but maybe partly, and maybe for a hybrid of additional reasons. Stapp's views have a role to play here, I think, as well.

One of my "wish list" items would be to take SOME of Hameroff's ideas and ask Stapp about them, and vice versa, in interviews, after carefully preparing questions and submitting them in advance. I have thought about how the two theories might compliment each other, or which parts of each might be independently verifyable and could be combined in a rationally coherent fashion that has some independent conceptual motivation (i.e. is other than ad hoc.)

I am in the process of preparing and writing a lenghty technical queston for Stapp, to clarify (and see what he thinks of a possible extension of) his theory of the relevance of the quantum zeno effect.

I thought of a way the quantum zeno effect, the way Stapp conceives of it, might be a way to resolve (with caveats) the simulation argument ... i.e. assess whether we are at the bottom level in the hierarchy, or are up on a sim. At least it would add another stipulation to the overall argument, which is significant in itself.

But that is another story. I have said enough to get me in trouble already, for a Friday night (grin).

Haha fair play. I wouldn't think to ask someone to get out of bed for $100 flat, but that was poorly communicated.

Not feeling too bad though since its happening anyway. Like asking to pay to have my own road repaved, only to be told by the clerk that they don't do that so I don't submit, then the town repaves it a year later and five figures cheaper.