Common Confusion About Agency, Will, Soul etc. of Humans and Biological and Artificial Agents - Todor's comment on The Asymptotic Illusion: On the Ontological Limitations of Artificial Agency

A discussion about the paper on Academia.edu:
* The Asymptotic Illusion: On the Ontological Limitations of Artificial Agency, Mohamad Al-Zawahreh, 25.12.2025
https://www.academia.edu/s/06c854dde5

Todor Arnaudov
10 days ago

Hi, this is a common confusion - building a straw-man of Turing machines or "computation" as defined in this abstract sense, while the counterpart argument refers to the full "stack" definition of the systems, down to the lowest level virtual universes (See Theory of Universe and Mind, T.A. 2001-2004+, e.g. "Stack Theory is yet another fork of Theory of Universe and Mind", 2025). Neither computers, nor LLMs, AI (in whatever form) or whatever are "just" algorithms, "computation" etc. - they are immersed in the Universe and their implementation includes those "non-computable" parts as well. On the other hand, all these advanced thinking, theories, logic, reasoning about "quantum" etc. would have been impossible without all the science and technology, all "mechanical" processing etc., i.e. the mighty "conscious" being wouldn't have been capable to even formulate these problems and their [personal] "superiority", they would have been just silly apes. There are a lot of discussions about that in TOUM, including the latest additions in the hyperbook "The Prophets of the Thinking Machines: AGI & Transhumanism: History, theory and pioneers; past, present and future". One point which I addressed in a letter to the cognitive semioticists Jordan Zlatev: the LLMs have no consciousness, but "just" etc. [see in appendix "Reflections on Everything" (Listove) from "The Prophets"]. However I haven't read anything but my own thoughts regarding the following problem, which is valid for humans and their mind as well: WHAT and WHERE *exactly* the LLM is located, why and who (evaluator-observer) sets the boundary exactly there (at what resolution of causality-control and perception) and what *exactly* it is when fully defined in order to function. It is not "just" the weights of the NN (what the h* is "NN" in the physical universe - it includes the whole hardware, all chips, all connected computers - your PC or smartphone, the routers, the Internet servers, the main GPU servers; it included the original data, the data in the memory (other representation); it includes also the *HUMANS* who interact, their biology, their states; it is a result of a chain of operations and activities of all related humans and other technologies and ultimately it requires the whole universe to be what it is. However, this is refuted and "vulgarized" to "they are algorithmic, they are "just 1s and 0s", "switches" (the earlier nonsense about computers, still defended e.g. by F.Faggin). No, computers are not "just 1s and 0s", and they emerged and operate in the same Universe as "humans"; besides humans are created and built also *WITH* the participation of all computers and technologies, i.e. humans are *PARTS of the machines* as well. "We are merged" without the need of "physical"/"short-molecular-distance"* way of interaction. See also an article about that in "The Prophets ..." in volumes: "Science Fiction. Futurology. Cybernetics. Transhumanism" and cited also as an appendix in the small monograph "Universe and Mind 6", which is related to this discussion. * Another school with this confusions (or choices) is "Relevance Realization", which is explaining definitions of Theory of Universe and Mind, published more than 20 years earlier, whoever they put a stamp "this is not computable", "the opposite of computation", while the original claims it is computable, but hierarchical, multi-scale, multi-domain, multi-precision, preemptive, has "interrupts" etc., they are built by the same fabric of the Universe computer and they interact with it and fetch "sensory" data from the common "pool". The real computers are like that, they are not the primitive and abstract strictly serial, one scale, "fixed symbols" Turing machine outputting AAABBBBBAAAAC-HALT. --- References: * Stack Theory is yet another Fork of Theory of Universe and Mind, T.A. 2025, SIGI-2025, https://artificial-mind.blogspot.com/2025/09/stack-theory-is-yet-another-fork-of.html

* Reflections on Everything/Listove (Листове, Листове по всичко) - a volume from The Prophets of The Thinking Machines: Artificial General Intelligence and Transhumanism: History, Theory and Pioneers; Past, Present and Future, T.Arnaudov, 2025 https://github.com/twenid/sigi-2025 See the cited excerpt from Todor's letter to Jordan Zlatev on what and where the LLMs are (it will be published as an article/paper as well), after p.340 "* Sentience or consciousness of another “entity” is in the eyes of the evaluator * Thoughts from a letter by Todor Arnaudov to the cognitive semioticist Jordan Zlatev , 16.8.2025" * "We are merged..." - see my article, answering Tim Tyler's video, published both in Reflections on Everything and in the volume "Science Fiction. Futurology. Cybernetics. Transhumanism" from The Prophets ... *Коментар на Тодор Арнаудов към видеото на Тим Тайлър „Да се слеем [с машините]“ от 10.2023 Tim Tyler: Let's merge! (...), p. ~175 in Listove The text in English, posted on Youtube: Todor: IMO humans and machines - actually the technologies, the recognizable systems, entities in the Universe (and the ones which are not recognizable for now) are merged anyway. The human individuals as bodies, entities are one "view", "rendering", a way of sampling of the actual intrinsic representation of the underlying properties and processes. The same goes for any piece of hardware, computer, robot, any object. They are what they are under a particular sampling of the data, in another sampling they are physically, causally, energic-based etc. connected and part of the causality, influence, events network and interrelated. In one philosophical school humans are defined as the set of "social relations". Also human individuals without technology and starting from scratch with no previous culture and language, which is also technology, are not very much more capable than apes in the first generations, or in the first hundreds of thousands of years. Technology, the environment and previous recorded knowledge and the social, scientific and technological "software" that gets loaded into our minds, all from the whole universe allow human beings to be so clever etc. So we are part of the human-machine (technology) system anyway.

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The distributed representation of humans and everything in a field-like form, the causal id/causal tags* theory etc. is discussed also in other volumes, such as "Universe and Mind 6" and "Is Mortal Computation Required for the Creation of Universal Thinking Machnes" at SIGI-2025. ** Note that "causal IDs" in my explanation are not referring to Michael T. Bennet's "causal identity" concept, but the match of similarly titled concepts in his fork (with unrecognized prior work) is funny. The causal IDs in my speculations are about hypothetical information and interaction entities or signals which allow or make the wholes, beings, systems to "feel" as a whole. I derived them from the insight that all systems in all scales and multi-scales encounter inevitable lags between their constituent parts, and these lags are varied. One way of a given causality-control unit - the building blocks in TOUM - to know that a signal is from a given whole, could be by special interactions and information, these "causal IDs", which could be updated and kept active for particular reasons, e.g. a chain of particular chemical, physical or whatever interactions within given .... etc. and fade. E.g. on the page on Github about TOUM in late 2023; most of "Universe and Mind 6" was written in the Spring of 2023 and in 2023-early 2024, but it was published as a completed monograph in 2025. https://github.com/Twenkid/Theory-of-Universe-and-Mind