The recent AI conversations I’ve heard and images I’ve seen have been so impressive that I wondered if anyone had created AI music using the same technologies. I was not surprised, therefore, to come across OpenAI’s musenet.
They trained a GPT-2 language model on masses of midi files, so that it could generate novel music from a few initial notes and a text prompt.
It’s not producing or creating the sound waves or the instruments, just (just 🙂 calculating a statistically likely continuation of a sequence of notes played by various instruments. It’s simulating the musicians, not the instruments.
Here is some music from a live performance the AI gave.
I admit these are not the greatest sounding compositions, but it’s early days, and pretty impressive none the less. Is it conscious though? I don’t think so, and here’s why:
If you want to create music using various AI technologies check out some of these:
Ecrett Music (you can play with this one online for free without having to sign up)
His paper helped put consciousness back on the table as something to be studied, while also pointing out the huge challenges to us in doing so.
Well, consciousness is the subject of my next extended God Puzzle piece. In these talking head videos I share why I think thinks like consciousness, love, beauty, and morality, point me to God. Maybe you will notice something transcendent about them too and follow me where they lead. We may never know what it’s like to be a bat, but we do know what it’s like to be us, and this experience of being us is something rather surprising. I think it’s another pointer to God. Not a proof maybe, but certainly a hint, a clue, and another piece of the God puzzle.
Actually, it was about this time last year, while I was on holiday, that I started really developing and writing the extended series of videos, and since then I’ve recorded 10 which is not bad going. Just 4 or 5 more now I think including an introduction.
I wanted to keep them all around 10 to 15 minutes, but this one on consciousness is the longest yet at around 20, mainly because I went down the Artificial Intelligence rabbit hole. There are some shockingly good AI chat-bots around now, and some even more stunning AI art-bots. The latter is my term for the massive neural networks that automatically create novel images from text prompts (not to be confused with these ArtBots). Lets see if it catches on!
I’ve included some AI conversations and artwork in the extended video, but the reason I did so was not just for fun. It’s another example of how a pointer to God is being gradually hidden in our culture. As technology becomes more able to simulate conversation and artwork, the temptation will be to assume a computer is not just intelligent and creative but conscious.
Our experience of being will be more plausibly attributed, therefor, to complex computation, rather than something mysterious about the universe and us. It’s my contention that this will be a false step. If we focus entirely on description, then of course a simulation will be equated with the real thing. But consciousness is not about function, it’s about feeling. It’s not about doing, it’s about being. And as such it challenges us to remove our description based blinkers and take in a broader worldview that attempts to address what something actually is, not just what it does. This wider worldview could then have the potential to answer the question of why we experience our existence in the way we do.
It’s also quite a long video because I wanted to include lots of quotes to show that I’m not the only one who finds consciousness rather puzzling. My favourite is from Colin McGinn, who says about the belief that the physical biology of the brain produces consciousness:
You might as well assert that numbers emerge from biscuits or ethics from rhubarb.
Colin McGinn
That would be a great prompt to put into an art-bot…
We may never know what it’s like to be a bat, but we do know what it’s like to
Here is the extended video on consciousness:
And here is the original short animated video about consciousness:
You can get the book version of the short vids here. I might turn these videos into a book one day but at the moment it’s taking me around 7 years per book, so don’t hold you breath.
As I say, I included some AI artwork in the extended video, but here are some more examples generated from various prompts I gave to Disco Diffusion and MidJouney. Disco Diffusion has the advantage of being able to generate videos by moving the output image slightly and then re-entering it back into the image generation system as a stating point for a new image:
When we have comprehensibly described life’s behaviour, will we have exhausted all that is significant about it? We are a long way from doing so, but just suppose that one day we manage to create a cat from scratch. Assuming that’s possible, which it may not be, I think we would still be left with the question of what life actually is, and the deep intuition that it’s source, it’s essence, is not reducible to an arrangement of inanimate matter. Just like beauty, love, and goodness, life seems to be a signifier of something transcendent. It’s not so much that life is made up molecules, but that molecules manifest life, making it visible. The atoms of an eye form a window through which we sense an immaterial soul.
My latest extended God Puzzle piece is about life. I hope it helps you see past the science of life to the source of life.
In my extended God Puzzle piece on morality, I argued that morality, as many understand it in terms of being kind, cooperating, sharing, not lying or steeling etc, is not grounded in evolution. That is, evolution does not produce more and more moral populations. I said that bad behaviour would be just as much a product of evolution as “good.”
Well, I just came across an experiment that shows this in action. Depending on the advantages and disadvantages of being nice or nasty, populations evolve to have a certain percentage of nice and nasty creatures in it. Check it out:
This is important because evolution is seen by some to ground objective morality. There is this idea is that we will evolve to be more kind and loving towards one another when in fact that may well not be the case at all. There may always be some advantage in being nasty if there are some nice people around to take advantage of. So the more nice people there are in a population, the more advantage there is in being nasty.
The experiment is a really good one, but actually we just need to look at the way both zebras and lions have evolved. Evolution, in principle, can produce carnivores and herbivores. Hawks and doves. Nice and nasty characters. So, if selfish genes produce selfish creature, what are we going to base morality on?
My next Extended God Puzzle piece is on complex structure. I was never sure what to call it as I’m not sure the exact formal meanings of complexity or structure. What I mean by using the two together is an arrangement of matter and energy that does not have a simple easy to describe order to it, and yet is not really random or uniform in it’s distribution. It is neither boringly simple nor overly complex. It’s somehow more than the physical position and distribution of the atoms.
ordered = simple, not complex, low information content
interesting = complex structure
uniform = no structure, random, high information content
What I’m suggesting in this God Puzzle piece is that what we see around us is more like the middle distribution than the other two, and that this structured complexity, however it came about, points to a designer. It may be that over time there is a flow from order to uniformity, through complex structure, but the exact form of the complex structure is still significant.
When you turn the focus dial on a camera, the image gradually appears out of the blur, coming into sharp relief, before melting away again. The scene was always there but it only became visible for a short while. The complex structure we see all around us is like that. The universe was always set up to produce it, even though it is only now coming into focus, and it may one day recede from our vision.
I’m just saying, it’s worth wondering about. Don’t let our descriptions shut the door to thoughts of a designer. Rather, let them draw you in open you up to the possibility of a creator.
Anyway, here is my latest Extended God Puzzle video on complex structure. See if you can spot the the Clangers reference:
Marcus Tutt's Blog 