Ghost Circuits… Machines That Think Without Code. What if intelligence doesn’t come from code at all? Computing comes from the tunability of materials and geometries. I sit down with Thrishantha Nanayakkara to share his journey of writing Ghost Circuits, it took him five years.

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@thrishlab Intelligence requires consciousness, in my opinion. That's why I prefer the term artificial computation to artificial intelligence. So can consciousness be emergent from a particular geometry of materials? Very likely.

@thrishlab Define consciousness first... we don't even have an agreed definition of it. And intelligence and consciousness are generally treated as separate things.

Let's say consciousness is awareness and awareness requires ability to have subjective experience, which requires a sense of self that is being aware. Intelligence is defined as the ability to learn, adapt to new information, solve problems, and achieve goals. The question is, what is learning? What is adapting? What is solving whose problems and what whose goals is it achieving? I say in an intelligent being the initiator of action is the intelligent being itself, not something external like a prompt for example.

@thrishlab This lights me up. Interested in learning more. Thanks! ✨

Yesterday I gave this talk to the Design Engineering community at @imperialcollege, where I leaned more towards the philosophical side of Ghost Circuits:

Listen on Spotify:

Thank you, @MarwaEldiwiny. You did a wonderful job distilling a five-year journey into a short conversation. I am delighted that these ideas are reaching a wider audience and provoking discussion about ghostly nature of intelligence.

Thank you, I appreciate that. It was a meaningful conversation for me as well, and I’m glad it’s resonating with a wider audience.

@thrishlab Indian scammer

@thrishlab This is so fascinating

@thrishlab @Plinz "What if intelligence doesn’t come from code at all? Computing comes from the tunability of materials and geometries." 🤯

That is sort of how evolution works. Evolution enhances the biological hardware by fitness selection. A fitter evolution creates or frees cognitive capacity which was previously deployed to deal with the environment in a prior (weaker) generation. For example, primates evolved digits. Adroitness is the evolutionary benefit and with that comes cognitive efficiency that no longer has to worry about "how to" grab something.

@thrishlab this guy gets it

@thrishlab Mountain ghost ? Did he say

Look forward to give this public talk at 11am today in the Dyson Building Library, 25 Exhibition Road, South Kensington. #ghostcircuits

@thrishlab Studying nature is the key If said this before

@thrishlab It's called evolution, that's the only thing which ever existed in the real world. 😂 Machines, engineering and coding are just our human attempts to create our own form of evolution.

@thrishlab Genetics on Dimension?