Tackling it now. Working my way up with the weaker version/proxy for character consciousness which i think is a character being aware that they’re in a work of fiction.
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Kind of like a metaphysical cameo. Doesn’t necessarily entail a breaking of the fourth wall.
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It’s more of the character being written in a way that makes them seem like they’re suffering from a Truman Show/monothematic delusion (a metathematic delusion?)
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Hamlet’s a particular good example because he 1.) consciously rejects playing ball with the revenge narrative set up for him and subverts it entirely 2.) directs his own plays as if he’s grappling with/investigating his condition
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Stuck on whether this just a really good aesthetic representation of consciousness, or an actual hashing/compressing of real consciousness into a static state.
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But instead of running this AI via a computer, we run it by reading/having actors “run” the character’s source code on their machine, themselves [Insert something about Keith Johnstone’s masks here]
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Like the Berkeley study that said that brains have separate clocks for “narrative” and “rhythm”. Maybe the narrative clock is the only essential one, and the other can be outsourced (to an actor or computer) without losing anything essential.
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In other words, consciousness is a film that’s projector agnostic. Like the crazy static universe idea:en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Static_un
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Fascinating. The clock angle is close to my own bunnytrail at the moment (how people create personal realities... in a way the converse problem to the one you're exploring).
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I think an easier proxy for consciousness is simulation hypothesis: how would you know if you were a simulation of the sort Bostrom and others think is highly probable. I think that's a bad hypothesis for entirely different reasons, but IF it were reasonable, how would you tell
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Haven’t yet read it, but it’s in the queue! Planning on reading it with another rec I got, “Theatre of the Real” by Carol Martin, which looks at what it means to “stage reality” and what she describes as the “ontological doubt” of theatre.
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thinking more about this, I seem to get caught in the literary character version of Strong AI “the correct simulation really is a mind” vs. Weak AI’s “the correct simulation is a model of a mind “ rut a lot.
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