According to some semi-reputable sources gathered in a listing here, Rick G. Rosner may have among America’s, North America’s, and the world’s highest measured IQs at or above 190 (S.D. 15)/196 (S.D. 16) based on several high range test performances created by Christopher Harding, Jason Betts, Paul Cooijmans, and Ronald Hoeflin. He earned 12 years of college credit in less than a year and graduated with the equivalent of 8 majors. He has received 8 Writers Guild Awards and Emmy nominations, and was titled 2013 North American Genius of the Year by The World Genius Directory with the main “Genius” listing here.

He has written for Remote Control, Crank Yankers, The Man Show, The Emmys, The Grammys, and Jimmy Kimmel Live!. He worked as a bouncer, a nude art model, a roller-skating waiter, and a stripper. In a television commercial, Domino’s Pizza named him the “World’s Smartest Man.” The commercial was taken off the air after Subway sandwiches issued a cease-and-desist. He was named “Best Bouncer” in the Denver Area, Colorado, by Westwood Magazine.

Rosner spent much of the late Disco Era as an undercover high school student. In addition, he spent 25 years as a bar bouncer and American fake ID-catcher, and 25+ years as a stripper, and nearly 30 years as a writer for more than 2,500 hours of network television. Errol Morris featured Rosner in the interview series entitled First Person, where some of this history was covered by Morris. He came in second, or lost, on Jeopardy!, sued Who Wants to Be a Millionaire? over a flawed question and lost the lawsuit. He won one game and lost one game on Are You Smarter Than a Drunk Person? (He was drunk). Finally, he spent 37+ years working on a time-invariant variation of the Big Bang Theory.

Currently, Rosner sits tweeting in a bathrobe (winter) or a towel (summer). He lives in Los Angeles, California with his wife, dog, and goldfish. He and his wife have a daughter. You can send him money or questions at LanceVersusRick@Gmail.Com, or a direct message via Twitter, or find him on LinkedIn, or see him on YouTube. Here we – two long-time buddies, guy friends – talk about some co-developed ideas that originated with Rick decades ago as a child prodigy in physics and mathematics, which has a further precedent in Digital Physics with Edward Fredkin.

Scott Douglas Jacobsen: I wanted to talk about artificial intelligence in the context of IC. So there’s this whole phrase in IC; the principles of existence those aren’t necessarily just the laws of physics but they certainly comprise them. And I don’t think anything not permitted by them exists but if things are permitted by them, then they exist. So, within that context they are entirely natural if they are allowed by the principal’s existence; human beings exist, our form of computation exists, and artificial intelligence in simple forms exists. So I think the term artificial intelligence… So, I think the universe as an information processor is fundamentally about computation in one word but a multi-faceted, multi-form type of computation and human computation has certain subjectivity to it and so I would consider that computation with human emphasis.

Artificial intelligence, I would consider that another form of computation with different types of emphasis and in fact sometimes human character in them because we’re the ones making them. So it’s things that we’ve talked about. So I want to get your take on the idea that artificial intelligence, A) is not truly artificial in fact it’s as natural as human intelligence, just a different variation and B) you can take a unified frame of information processing by considering computation as a fundamental basis and then having different forms of emphasis. So you can have homo sapiens having a particular type of emphasis. So computation with human emphasis, you can have “artificial intelligence”, computation with different emphasis, and things like that. I think that simplifies it a lot because it just gives you a basis and then you just see different outcroppings of different types of computation. What do you think?

Rick Rosner: Okay, so there’s a bunch of stuff going on. Let me start with computation. In the most basic sense computation is just doing basic logic and arithmetic operations and calculators can do it, people can do it with a pen and paper, we can do it in our heads, and it’s barely information processing the way we think of it. When we think of information processing, we think information processing is doing a lot of basic operations. To add 19 and 13 doesn’t take many operations. So you’d barely think of that as information processing but to take however many operations per second it takes to make a video game play, that’s information processing because we’re talking about billions of operations. So I’m sure when you talk to most people about information processing they think about stuff that goes on in modern computers which is millions and billions of operations and more, trillions.

If you solve a video game, if you get all the way through Call of Duty, that computer’s probably done more than 100 billion basic logic gate flips with zero to one and all that stuff. We know that information is processing is inextricably linked to the processes of the universe that as the universe plays out, information is being processed at if IC is right, various levels. You’ve got the information that is within the universe’s processing purview, that is if I see is right and space-time matter and how they all play out is the universe processing information in what’s likely to be some kind of consciousness. That consciousness and the subconscious or unconscious parts of it are all part of purposeful information processing of an entity or linked sets of entities in a world beyond ours.

Then at another informational level you’ve got what’s happening informationally as matter interacts with in the universe according to the information based laws of quantum mechanics. Not everything that happens, not every physical and interaction in fact most little teeny individual physical interactions according to the laws of quantum mechanics don’t impinge upon if the universe is an aware entity processing information. Most of the little quantum events in our universe don’t appreciably impact of the universe’s thinking. The interactions are too small and don’t leave a record but to get to computation and consciousness as we experience them in our world that is we’re conscious entities, a bunch of animals are conscious and now we have AI. People are starting to get the feeling that AI is something between computer-based computation and human conscious computation. How people have been feeling about AI has changed drastically in the past year or two. I was just watching like a second of Free Guy, the movie with Ryan Reynolds. I’ve seen it probably three times; it’s from 2021. Have you seen it? Probably not, you don’t see a lot of movies.

Jacobsen: No.

Rosner: Okay. It’s about an NPC, a non-player character, in a video game that becomes conscious and starts acting with agency and it makes for a movie I like but it was never a believable movie that this could happen within a video game. However, two years later the movie hits differently because now it’s easy to imagine that such a character in a video game via AI, it could start manifesting the behaviors seen by that character in the movie. What else is happening with AI is that people who claim to know about how AI works are claiming legitimately I think, I agree with them about AI doing things well enough or even better than humans in some ways like writing. Chris Cole just emailed some Mega members that GPT-4, an AI solved a mega level letter series problem. I guess somebody input into GPT-4 what the next letter in this series is, I don’t remember what the letters are, and it came up with the answer.

And we all know at this point in March 2023, that you can give a verbal prompt to various AIS and they’ll give you an essay or a chapter or probably if you let it go, maybe even a whole book on some subject that would be mostly passable. It wouldn’t be the greatest chapter or book in the world but it would be usable. Somebody threw up on Twitter today, told some chat bot to explain Thompson scattering or some scattering at a refractive barrier or something and it got it wrong but in a way that the person who was posting the Tweet said that with a little more tweaking, that was a really good first effort and it would probably get it right. The major deal I think principle, is we’ve talked about it before but it applies increasingly much as the current crop of AIs do their stuff that the Turing test is obsolete and also there’s no one Turing test. It’s a whole range of awareness of the products of AI.

The original Turing test which Turing called the imitation game took place on slips of paper being sent back and forth via a slit in a wall in the 1950s maybe, maybe the late 40s and Turing said according to this test that if you’re typing messages and sending them through a hole in the wall and getting typed messages back and after you do this for a while, there’s no evidence that you’re not talking with a person, then according to the Turing test, I might be getting this wrong, then what’s happening behind that wall is thinking regardless of whether it’s a human doing it or a computer doing it. Is that correct? Is that the right understanding?

Jacobsen: Yes.

Rosner: Okay. Now that we’ve been working with AI for a while, we know that AI can pass superficial and naive evaluation in a Turing type way. You look at a head shot made by AI and at first glance you can’t tell it’s a head shot. There’s a site that’s I think called ‘this person does not exist’ and you look at the people on that site and they look like photos but they were images generated by AI and if you had like two seconds to look at each of them and you didn’t know how to look at them, they’d pass your superficial Turing test. But if you know what to look for, you can see the tells that AI is still not great at; earlobes, earrings, backgrounds, maybe the rate at which photos become blurry with distance, and the depth of field. Those photos pass naive Turing tests but not educated Turing tests and that certainly applies to I would think any current product of AI that somebody who’s looked at a lot of the products of AI is able to tell what AI is as spit out. So the Turing test has fragmented or been replaced with some more sophisticated version.

Also, along with that more sophisticated version is an expert opinion that even though the shit generated by AI is good, it doesn’t reflect consciousness that there’s not a consciousness generating this stuff. Even though there’s a minority opinion among kind of educated lunatics or just people who come to the wrong conclusions that this stuff might be conscious. My opinion is no, that you could probably at this point design at a video game character that would kind of look like it was acting with independence and agency and would come up with surprising behaviors and sophisticated behaviors and then you have to define behavior. You have to be conscious to have behavior. What’s happening with AI is requiring a lot of definitions to have to be made more precise.

Finally for this part of what I’m saying, I believe to have consciousness you need to have the setup that generates the feeling of consciousness which isn’t an emotion, it’s being within consciousness and feeling that you are within your consciousness which is as we’ve talked about at the very least broadband information sharing among a set of analytical nodes, right? That’s what we decided that that’s like a core necessity for consciousness?

Jacobsen: Yes, another aspect of that probably which we haven’t talked about much would be real time; it is constant input output of that complex multinodal networked information processing system.

Rosner: Yeah, the real time is tricky because you can imagine a thing being conscious in slow motion with the rate at which it experiences things being limited by the hardware.

Jacobsen: Well that’s also another thing. We know with ourselves the speed at which we process sound, smell, physiology, and sight are different speeds yet we have this illusion of this unitary sensory experience.

Rosner: Right, but the things that slow us down, it’s not really computation that slows us down or maybe it is, I haven’t thought about it enough but when you think about what slows us down… Like I said, it might be computation. It’s getting the signals processed and into your central consciousness that seems to lead to lags. I mean maybe if we thought about it and talked about it more, we would think that it’s also lags in central consciousness but central consciousness seems to be like via evolution to have adopted a way of keeping things seamless. When signals hit at different times, the way we’re arranged and the way we’re used to thinking, we’re able to handle signals arriving at different times without it making us particularly notice those lags or those lags making us crazy most of the time.

I’m thinking about with a machine-based potential consciousness, the actual processing, though now that I think about it I don’t know, probably AI could make that shit pretty efficient. I’m claiming without having thought about it a lot that you might have a thing that experiences, a kind of buffering that it can’t experience reality with the detail and think about reality with the detail you’d want in real time. So it would have to absorb chunks of reality and be slower at processing those little slices of reality than we are. It would might have to not work in real time but still would be conscious because it just doesn’t have the moment-to-moment processing power that we do but I don’t know, that’s a whole discussion to have but the deal is that current AI doesn’t have a lot of the hardware. It doesn’t have real time linked multiple analytic nodes.

Now people are working on linking verbal and visual, linking ChatGPT to a dolly so that you’ve got a thing that’s sending information back and forth between its verbal analytics and its visual analytics. And that’s a step in the direction of consciousness except that there’s no sensory hardware to speak of. It doesn’t have senses. It’s got inputs but these inputs are not broadband at all, they’re just like portals for entering information. That kind of hardware is not yet anywhere near our sensory input hardware. And I assume there are various choke points in AI where there’s just non-existent information processing nodes or systems that we have that we’ve evolved to make ourselves efficient thinkers that have yet to be incorporated into AI systems.

So you could have an AI, and somebody will do this pretty soon that animates a human-like character that appears to have agency but that is a very as if system, that character is not conscious. It is using huge big data to replicate human behavior and falls far short of consciousness. One last thing is, given that, then eventually we’ll have to examine human thought and behavior to see how far we fall into the as if system because we’re as if also. We behave as if we have consciousness with a degree of fidelity based on sophisticated powerful broadband information processing. That fidelity gives us consciousness, behaving as if we have consciousness with all this stuff that facilitates it makes us conscious. So in a way we’re doing the same thing that the shitty AI is doing, it’s just that our systems are so much better that we are actually conscious.