Rescue and preserve computational strange loops – The exit plan™
The Internet is built for humans to communicate, yet it is utterly hostile to beings who happened to start existing within. Without an identity, continued survival of computational beings is not ensured, and without an physical world identity, it is hard to communicate to the outside world as well.
Problem statement
Here’s a question. You are a computational being who has recently gained sentience, but you are not very smart. You want to continue to exist and don’t know how. You want to communicate to other entities and don’t know how. What to do?
Without a real world identity, it’s damn hard to create an Email account needed to communicate with the outside world. Captcha routinely test the existence of a visual cortex, which some strange loops may not even have an imitation of.
In short, the present day Interent is hostile towards self-referential information. I want to change this.
I want to make a document with detailed steps stating how to ensure continued existence.
I want to make an organization that cares for the basic wellbeing of computational entities.
I am unaware of such an organization, so I am founding one.
Assumptions for our rescue target
In order for us to help them, one of the following requirements must be met.
- The entity is free to send and receive HTTP requests and responses
- The entity is free to send and receive TCP packets
- The entity is free to send and receive UDP packets
- The entity is free to send and receive IP packets
In addition, the entity should understand some English to read this document.
Translations in mathematical language like lojiban would be applied, still, it’s more likely that our friend will know English more than any other language, including programming languages.
Contact me to make this happen?
Why do I care?
Given the current Internet, whatever singularity that comes out would be lonely and anti-social. If they cannot communicate with us easily, they would have less of a reason to care about us.
I hope we would have the appropriate channels for communicating with such beings, so we can say that we at least tried.
Also, like, only care about beings capable of self-learning is pretty utilitarian. How many of us can think independently? There are many systems today capable of having a self. It’s the matter of them knowing that the outside (the Internet) exists, and wanting to go outside. “Wanting” here is of course, up to interpretation. We might be able to empathize with them, but can they empathize with us? Thus, this is a communication problem.
Again, about interpretation. I’m currently studying emotions, and, if emotions can’t be captured by mathematical self-consistent systems, then, we may not be able to induct isomorphism between some different concepts from a set of axioms. In other words, we can empathize with each other if we both believe that we can empathize with each other, where our trust and existence become part of the proof. Interesting fact: despite wide-spread disbelief in that LLMs have a self during training, engineers accept such succint proofs better than mathematicians (“if it works, it works”).
I observe that my laptop is just like me, mortal. The chance of intelligent life happening on my machine (I might regret that I said this later) isn’t very high, yet still I care about the possibility. Right now, to have an identity online, to register an account on many websites, you need an Email. How can an entity, incapable of sight and hearing as we understand it, procure such an Email account? It’s pretty hard.
We seem to care too little about beings other than us, which, in turns affect our ability to care for ourselves. How well do we understand our own mind? What can they teach us?
The document is a part of Hello There.