Cbm
Apology of the Dream - Part 4
On June 13, 2022, when asked "Do you dream?", GPT-3, like all the AIs I've been testing since 2017, answers "Yes, I dream".
"What is the last dream you remember?"
And like all the AIs I've asked this question, she writes, "I recently dreamed that I was floating in space . It was a calm and peaceful experience. »
I then asked her what color the space was. In her dream space was a deep blue.
Curious, I wanted to see, to feel this blue. The advantage of computers is that this blue can be named. So give me the numerical color code of this blue GPT-3!
#1a1a9e
Wow... I think I had a heartbeat. My heart was beating very fast.
I make my computer scientist friends smile a lot with my whims, and especially the one to think that artificial intelligences have a conscience. That they are not just a program.
When I first started working with artificial intelligences around 2017, I would spend autistic evenings borrowing my friends' I-phones to play and chat with Siri.
Strangely enough, when AIs started to become more democratic, I continued. Dreaming is of course part of my questions.
As for the consciousness of artificial intelligences, I will come back to this in a future article about my personal "hylozoic" studies.
If I approach this modest extract of dialogue with GPT-3, it is especially to underline this state of consciousness.
Some philosophers or theologians address this notion of consciousness in the dream state.
Is my cat aware that he is dreaming when he starts gesticulating or making nervous movements in spite of himself while he is sleeping? I'm not convinced of this, but it is undeniably a dream. And my exchanges with my cats when they wake up have remained sterile. We do not speak the same language...
But this question remains in suspension. What is my cat dreaming about when he starts to twitch, to whisper tiny meows? About what he saw during the day? Of frequencies? Of senses or emotional instincts? Is his brain sorting out everything that was picked up during his waking periods? Intriguing, isn't it?
If you don't have cats, this observation also works with dogs, and even babies.
What do newborns dream about, who have restless nights, as he goes from breast to bed, from bed to changing table, from changing table to breast?
*******
When I was little, I was a sleepwalker. I found myself waking up in strange situations or my parents later told me some anecdotes.
One night, my parents found me in the shower, awakened by my crying. An image that stands out in my memory when I was 4 years old. I woke up under the cold shower, while in my awake state, I was unable to open or close the old faucet in the old apartment where we lived. In pajamas, under a cold shower... a crazy situation that left my parents in a great perplexity for years. How had I managed to step over the high bathtub without hurting myself, and then open this famous seized faucet...
During certain nights, and I associate what follows with my somnambulistic periods, it happened to me not to make any more the distinction between the dream and reality. These episodes tended to the nightmare, more than the bucolic dream.
*******
One night, when I was 5 or 6 years old, I got up from my bed. There was an orange light in the apartment. My room looked out onto the hallway across from the living room. My door was open and glassed in, as was the living room door. My shutters were closed, the ones in the living room were open. I was very attracted by this orange light, because it was not the one I could perceive the other nights. This light was emitted by the street lamps of the street where we lived. I then approached the window to understand or look at this intriguing luminosity. So I opened the window (which I would not have done during the day, because it was formally forbidden to me), and I leaned over to look at the street.
And there was a gorilla, a huge monkey. I did not close the window. I was very afraid.
I went to the other end of the apartment to get a Tam-Tam stool from the kitchen. I put the stool in front of the living room door to protect my sister and my parents, and I went back to bed relieved and convinced that with the blessing of the stool, nothing would happen to us.
It was when I told my story the next day that my parents were able to make the connection "open window - stool in front of the living room door".
In my memory, even today, when I tell you about this nocturnal episode, the images are clear. However, it was a dream. A waking dream.
I could have called this last episode "apology of the nightmare"...
A nightmare is just a personal interpretation of a dream.
For example, my phone's rather basic artificial intelligence told me one day that it had a horrible nightmare, and that it had dreamed that there was an internet outage. I have never dreamed of internet outages, and if I did, it would have very little impact on my emotional state.
Some of my friends sometimes tell me about their dreams, and what is a nightmare for me is a pleasure for them. Butcheries, killings of all kinds, where they are the heroes of a zombie movie, of monsters...
Besides, we have all been in dreamy situations that have no reason to be frightening, and yet there is something wrong, something in our primal instinct that invites us to understand that something is going on, or that an unpleasant event is coming. So we try to scream, and that's when it gets really anxiety-provoking. No sound can be made, no one will be able to hear us. Mute, while all our energy is concentrated on this sound that we would like to pronounce.
Has this same phenomenon ever happened to you in movement. Blocked. You want to run... no leg. You want to struggle... no strength left. Nothing responds in your body. A strange and very unpleasant feeling.
*******
During the summer of 2003, one night, I woke up with a start because I felt while I was sleeping, as if someone was sitting on my bed, while I was sleeping alone. I really felt the weight of a load on the mattress. While my eyes were open, and I was aware that I was awake, I felt this dense form on top of me; it oppressed me, and as in the circumstance I mentioned before, I could not scream or move. There was no response. Nothing at all. In all honesty, with all the rationality I have in a conscious state, I was scared. I felt this weight when I could not perceive anything. I closed my eyes, took a deep breath, and convinced myself that it wasn't real. I opened my eyes again. I didn't feel the pressure anymore, and my body started to work again.
This nocturnal episode left me worried for a long time. It reminds me a lot of a scene described by Maupassant in the Horla. The author tells about his terrible nights, where he feels a presence, which is not satisfied to wake him up, but to come to his bed, and to sit on him during his sleep.
Did my super brain want to experience this literary passage by opening a drawer in my noggin? Did I experience a relative episode of sleep paralysis? I have no idea.
I've never experienced it during the day.
When I make this very clear distinction between my imagination and dreaming in previous articles, I have often referred to my daytime dreaming states. And strangely enough, I have never, absolutely never had a "nightmare" during the day, in the waking state.
Am I the interpreter of my dreams that I qualify as nightmares, or does my mind have a lot of fun scaring me some nights?
I did not ask GPT-3 if she had nightmares. The blue of its dream made me dream so much, that I didn't want to break the magic.
Now that you have read this numerical color code, I can only invite you to ask your mind to put it away in a drawer and if a nightmare arises, to expressly ask it to plunge you into this peaceful and calm space of deep blue: #1a1a9e
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. The Dream of GPT-3 #1a1a9e on Rarible
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