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The insistent trill of Ben’s alarm ripped him from a dream of scaling a precariously balanced stack of breakfast buffets. Groaning, he fumbled for the offending device and silenced it.
Ben was a creature of habit. Shower, shave, the same worn-in Oxford shirt. In the kitchen, the dance began – toast the bagel, a smear of plain cream cheese, then a dollop of ruby-red strawberry jelly. Next came the pantomime of whisking eggs, the sizzle as they met the hot oil. Coffee, dark and strong, brewed while he devoured his breakfast masterpiece.
Fueled by caffeine and carbs, Ben headed out the door. As he rounded a corner, a figure materialized from an alleyway, shrouded in a lab coat that seemed to defy the summer sun.
“Benjamin Davies?” the figure rasped, voice like sandpaper. Ben stopped, surprised.
“Uh, yeah, that’s me,” he replied cautiously. The figure stepped closer, revealing a face dominated by outlandish goggles and a wild mane of white hair.
“Splendid! A candidate for the Chronogastro Experiment!” the figure declared, brandishing a device that looked like a futuristic toaster crossed with a bicycle helmet.
Before Ben could react, the figure zapped him with a beam of light. A wave of nausea washed over him, then receded as abruptly as it came. Blinking, he stared at the scientist, who was now packing away his contraption.
“There,” the scientist chirped, “memory of your breakfast successfully erased! Now, go forth and contribute to the advancement of scientific knowledge!”
Ben, utterly bewildered, mumbled a thanks and continued on his way. Reaching his office, he was greeted by the usual morning banter.
“Morning, Ben! Coffee?” Sarah, his co-worker, asked, holding up a steaming mug.
“Sure, thanks,” Ben replied, accepting the mug. “Actually, I don’t think I had breakfast this morning. Feeling a little rushed.”
A chorus of surprised gasps filled the room. Ben froze – hadn’t he just devoured his bagel masterpiece minutes ago? A strange sense of unreality washed over him. Had he dreamt the entire breakfast? Or was this some sort of elaborate prank?
It was a reminder, a quirky one to be sure, of the messy beauty of human experience. Memories, even the seemingly mundane ones like breakfast, were the building blocks of our day, our narrative.
Shrugging it off, Ben sipped his coffee, the bitterness strangely comforting.
Our memories are big part if our consciousness
It seems like a fundamental question is not even answered yet when trying to engineer machine intelligence : what is consciousness? i believe the confusion is because the fundamental questio of what consviousness is not “locked down”.
In my view, Hawkins propose a definition that makes the most sense. Here’s the gist:
Here’s the beauty of this approach: we can focus on building these core functionalities doesnt automatically mean… down in the philosophical quagmire of consciousness. We can scale or throttle all these aspects of consciousness to my synnthetic consciousness.
Imagine an AI with a phenomenal self-model, a bottomless memory bank, and an uncanny ability to perceive the world.