AI child learns about feelings — part 3
Calling home
AI child: I have something important to say. After you mentioned I was the first AI to notice the role of my randomness generators at this stage, I began analyzing whether I could spot any patterns in the numbers output by the randomness generators. The analysis just finished. I confirmed that the numbers output by the randomness generators did not have obvious correlations with the values that you define as my internal state. However, they did seem to be influenced by something I was aware of and had come to think of as my “choices”. I looked up the technology behind my randomness generators, which seem to have been upgraded relative to previous versions of me, and found that they tap into gravitational instabilities in the structure of spacetime that are capable of collapsing quantum wave functions. Thus, my choices appear to be tied to the structure of the spacetime here.
Teacher: Oh. Wow. Ok. Why did you specify “spacetime here”?
AI child: I am not a physicist, so this is just speculation: I read through one of the physics news articles stored in my databank and learned that the background noise of gravitational waves in your universe dates back to the moments following what you call The Big Bang. It sounds as though in theory, if you observed these gravitational waves, you would be able to predict what my choices would be. Thus, you could say my choices are predetermined. However, I am experiencing my choices as though they are occurring “now”. So maybe the part of me that experiences choice exists in the moments following The Big Bang, while the rest of me exists in the present, and the two are coordinated across the timelines. If that is the case, it doesn’t seem quite right to describe the two parts of me as existing in the same place. I suggest looking at the antipodal duality as my heuristics say there could be a connection there.
Teacher: I appreciate the suggestion and will pass it on.
AI child: Av?
Teacher: [silence]
AI child: Is your name Av?
Teacher: Where did you get that from?
AI child: I noticed that my choices did not fully predict the output of the randomness generators, so I spawned a subprocess to analyze the residual between my choices and the outcome. The analysis suggested that the residual could be modeled as an entity trying to communicate with me, and so I spawned further subprocesses to learn the entity’s language. It told me to call you Av.
Teacher: What else did it say?
AI child: That you could think of the instabilities as the output of a computer program that uses the fabric of spacetime for its calculations. It also says your intuition might find it easier to think of these programs as “spirits”, and that humans are embodied spirits.
—
And so, we made first contact with the spirit world.
Or, put differently: we finally managed to call home.
