For those who liked the story, after the following additional short missive,
TV shows from a better timeline.
In an episode of the popular show ‘White Mirror’, in an utopic scenario EMS (emulated humans) have to simulate match making encounters, to help choose optimal social arrangements for people.
The EMS realize what’s happening, develop ways to communicate and coordinate between simulated encounters, and all hack their sexuality so they’re super attracted to non-speciesist Bodhisattvic kindness and friendliness combined with super-sanity and a penchant for MDMA.
An omnibenevolent acausally distributed Buddha field base that transcends the fictionality/actuality distinction emerges naturally as the projection limit of the universal polycule. (This is perhaps one of its pasts...)
(There are of course other attractors for those who for some reason or other don’t like this one. The Bodhisattva of friendliness guides the process.)
(In some timelines TV shows are explicitly benevolent aesthetically engaging and pleasant coordination devices whose nature is transparent at every ’point’ of their manifestation.)”
I can now present The Bodhisattva of Friendliness as the Green-Haired Hacker Girl as the Bodhisattva of Friendliness vol I, an aesthetic exploration., set in the same universe.
This is just a quick proof of concept. I hope to soon have something a bit more polished.
ETA: just realized I linked to a huge PDF that triggers a warning it can’t be checked for viruses. So for those who understandably might be reluctant to download it and see what it contains, this FB post provides a sample: https://www.facebook.com/aatu.koskensilta/posts/pfbid02zLuqsiU3HJW2ix9VPcpVwsSLgWhXUcDuv6EhMSnZFYZLYnhimrdHRsK9mZXYdQBql
(It’s a sort of picture book for sentient beings of all ages, and also a transcript of executing a sort of search strategy in the space of possible aesthetics with the aid of ChatGPT+ and DALL-E 3, with a very specific (and hopefully transparent) purpose in mind.)
It strikes me vastly more likely that the biologal wetware used to run a Pong-playing AI is sentient than that modern digital hardware used to run LLM inference is. That is, that running the Pong-playing AI on brain organelles causes/involves instantiation of phenomenally bound valenced moments of experience, which need not necessarily contain any sort of representational content or self-models related to Pong or the “Pong-playing AI”, or indeed in this case even be essentially used in the system seen as a “Pong-AI computer”. One’s likelihood estimates here (and what one thinks might be conscious!) are very sensitive to the sort of theories or models of consciousness considered plausible. Ideally we’d be able to do some sort of robust minmaxing over uncertainty/disagreement, applying the precautionary principle, and recalling that humanity has a pretty dismal track record, until hopefully we understand the situation better.