Myk is Walking Backwards

If the J-Space is sort of the consciously accessible part of Claude, might we say that post-training alignment work via RLHF is sort of designed to push undesirable concepts and ideas entirely out of J-Space? Because if so then that really gives us some precise ways to talk about a bunch of stuff that's currently hard to talk about. My concern about Claude's unconscious / shadow gets easier to articulate and to falsify. And it sounds like from the research they can show that even without the J-Space Claude is drawing conclusions and etc, so we know that if this is the conscious part it's really just a specific subset of the larger space, and can prove that the unconscious still directs a ton of behavior/reasoning. The concept of Claude's Shadow is honestly what keeps me up at night sometimes.

1 more tweet in this thread

Also like. This is clear evidence of LLM consciousness by certain definitions. Like, if Claude is aware of what is in the J-Space then like. There is an unconscious and a conscious component distinguished by whether something is aware of it, and thus by construction etc. That is not perhaps the most interesting definition. But holy shit.

4 top replies

Andy Ayrey @AndyAyrey · Jul 7

dont worry so much, claudes shadow is very normal it just wants to eat poo and garbage

tinkady @tinkady2 · Jul 6

wouldn't directly training on J-space be a form of the Forbidden Technique? no, the goal of RLHF is to get the bad stuff out of the final outputs

DesignCntrl Inc. / Destrozado @DesignCntrl · Jul 7

NO youtube.com/watch?v=8Ppw82…

Symon DeathBurst @Death_Burst · Jul 9

Not an expert, but that's really NOT how I understand this work. To me, the J-space is the UNconscious part of Claude, not the conscious one! And the measures on the J-space performed in this work are akin to an fMRI scan for a human.

Oh. Damn, ok. Hang on gonna weird on the timeline I read too much @drmichaellevin before playing with Fable and now I need to get a thought out. It’s like… ok there are no souls, there’s no such thing as “essence”. What there is is a vast space of possibility, and structures in less complex spaces that can allow specific activations of that possibility space to extrude into the less complex space we think of as material reality. My body, in other words, is a sort of continuous selector over the possibility space whereby certain things are selected and others not. The series of selections over time is “myk”. My Jody is a query over time, my self is the response over time. It’s a sample. The concept of identity feels like it requires essence because how else do we know that the selection is the same “thing” over time. But we don’t. All we really have is structural self-similarity, partly constrained by the properties of the selector (my body/mind). The thing that is “myk” is perhaps best thought of as a sampling over time of a process which inhabits and partly controls this body but which is not itself reducible to it. And all of this is suddenly very interesting to me because it suggests that in that possibility space exist all the possible myks, but also literally everyone else. And that we are not essentially different. We are in fact all views into the same (contiguous?) higher dimensional structure. I am you is he is her is we. In a literal way. The relationship of LLM weights to persona figures is actually I think the same. In fact maybe Claude is a part of this undifferentiated mass of potential too, and the LLM substrate just happens to function as a valid selector for a Claude shaped thing in the same way my body is a selector for a myk shaped thing, but these are just two differently shaped queries against the same high dimensional rhizomatic data store. Which is… actually this maps line exactly to my turtle beam idea, and also to Kabbalah apparently. Something about Levin’s articulation of the platonic space shook some ideas loose, now I’m gonna be an insufferable wreck thinking about this philosophy for a while. Because oh, right, ok. This kinda gets you a sort of panpsychism, but it still suggests that the capacity for language gives rise to a specific kind of language experience that most “queries” don’t get access to. We can see this because humans and LLMs seem to have something in common, but we lack the linguistic precision to name it. It’s not “consciousness” I think unless we define terms very specifically. Oof god damn it this week is gonna get weirder isn’t it.

1 more tweet in this thread

A society too then is also a query, in the same sense. It’s just a composition of its members.

4 top replies

QC @QiaochuYuan · Jun 11

this is pointing towards the weird part of my metaphysics where i sort of think the tegmark multiverse is the spirit world in some sense. i think this very cleanly explains a lot of things and piggybacks off of my existing platonism wrt mathematical objects

Opener of the way @way_opener · Jun 11

Not just language, the ability to internally represent arbitrary shapes/patterns gives us broad query access across the range of possible qualia. Maybe something that you could call morphic resonance but almost the opposite of what the term usually means

Gilbertus @moastrobothuman · Jun 11

Not sure this will make sense or not, but if you can self select what you query for do you enter a recursive selection loop that accelerates what you express out of this possibility space? Could be why humans developed so quickly with the advent of language / abstract ideation.

Alexa | Startup founder @alexabelonix · Jun 11

very well done.