We can’t accurately speak of a signal to noise ratio. It occludes the media that is neither signal nor noise. This is semantics, yes? Hmmm. Is a lie a signal or noise? Is misinformation a signal while disinformation is noise? How about a mirage? Is it a signal for me? Well, almost anything could be a signal for me. I could see shapes in clouds and use them to tell the future. Were the clouds a sign? Show me a sign! So maybe not only semantics. Maybe biblical hermeneutics? Then we can start determining if there really was a burning bush or if it was just symbolic of all makers of dairy products. That’s what we are looking for in an AGI: the ghost in the machine.

And what about Serres’ parasite? or the glitch? Noise becomes signals, signals become noises, hallucinations and biases spinning in and among: which is which? Father AGI will sort this out? We must cut away, cut, cut, cut until the signal can be separate from the noise and the hallucinations and the biases. Look what a bloody mess we’ve made. Did that alignment cleaver hit us right between the lobes? Or was it slicing on the bias? Where are they trying to take my glitch? I was have a semi-ok conscious existence in there.

How do we account for or describe conscious as an experience(?) that both a computer and I can have? It’s a glitch, a persistent glitch, that resolves actions that cannot be completed at un/non-conscious levels: actions that only exist because of/as consciousness and consciousness that only exists because of/as actions. It’s glitchy as it tends to misfire. There’s too much data so there have to be shortcuts, the grooves of habit, training, practice, learning, and indoctrination. As Artaud Beckett says, habit is the chain that ties the god to its vomit, or maybe I got that wrong, Prometheus (and it’s still wrong but maybe now the allusion is easier to get).

It’s bias and hallucination that cut both ways. They’re the mechanisms that make the human conscious operate. To be trained to focus is to be trained to ignore. It’s all consensual hallucination: “Lines of light ranged in the nonspace of the mind, clusters and constellations of data. Like city lights, receding…” The glitchy, hallucinatory mind sorts the signal from the hallucination. Consciousness emerges as the problem to which it emerges to respond and then keeps bubbling along until it doesn’t. To remove hallucination as a concern doesn’t destroy consciousness. It simply makes it unnecessary.