That’s not exactly true. The implementation details around context management matter to the user a use case. It’s totally feasible for providers to go into different directions, especially if they’re hoping to target different subsections of the same market.

Honestly, ID verification wouldn’t be so bad if we didn’t have to worry about regimes using our data in ways we wouldn’t approve of. Has everyone forgotten that loading your drivers license into your Apple Wallet was (at first) an exciting idea; how long ago was that?

I would wonder whether ID verification can be made cryptographically secure, reliable, completely anonymous, and it’s tech stack FOSS. For example, if we could do something like public/private key pairs but where I’m validating my identity as a human rather than as a server. The thing is, how can we do it while (1) not centralizing the identity authority and (2) not requiring a priori trust relationships?

1. Users should not have to worry about a single point of failure/attack where their identity is concerned
2. Users should be able to sign-up for a new service and continue using it without ever having to pre-establish a trust relationship — like sending them a public key first.
3. The process should confirm I am human without confirming which human I am.

This is difficult for my brain. I want to say something like… what if we created a decentralized identity provider that was free to sign-up for and use, via (dare I say) blockchain technology?

A neat version of this, whatever works, would include the ability to reveal various attributes of my person on a service by service basis. For example, my bank can know my age but my Lemmy cannot.

That leads me to another point. Users should be able to authenticate with multiple services (e.g., bank, Lemmy) but the identity information provided to each service should not be compatible. It should inherently prevent cross-platform session stitching.

Which leads me to my last point. It might be worth considering a nerf on this thing… maybe it should not supply any stateful information about a single person — even to the same service — by default. This stops single-platform session stitching too, so users don’t need to worry about transparent tracking / fingerprinting [unless they choose to expose a static-attribute to the service and the service tracks it as a user-account].

This could be really interesting. Considering cryptocurrency wallets, I wonder how much of the necessary code already exists.

Edit: the most interesting part is, we can develop this the right way and use it against oligarch armies like Meta. The push for ID verification is using good-sounding arguments to do something bad. So, if we develop the tech first — which does the good things but none of the bad things — it forces Meta to either accept the terms or change their position to something much more failure prone.

Edit 2: okay, hear me out… I’ve got an idea, and it only partly requires a trusted authority.

Steps:

1. We establish a blockchain identity layer that’s free to sign-up and use.
2. User wallets contain signed statements from trusted authorities, kind of like digital notaries.
3. Signed statements can come directly from governing entities, like a college or DMV.
4. While governing entities are still getting their shit together, we establish a third party trustee who verifies documents and issues certificates. Documents are always temporary/deleted. Certificates are stable / timebound as necessary.
5. Users can create attribute-profiles, which contain a specific set of certificates. For example, a profile may confirm I possess a DMV credential showing age >18. without supplying a stable identifier, making it possible to prove age while impossible to track the same individual across sessions.
6. Users can optionally include more attributes in the a profile, for stable account tracking with a service.
7. By default, a service never gets a stable identifier. Not a wallet number, not a user id, nothing like that.
8. The service should maintain its own ability to supply a “service level ID” as a dynamic profile attribute. This should allow session stitching for the same service, but not across services. Rather than storing a bunch of IDs, I’d argue for a way to deterministically derive the IDs.
9. The service could even maintain its own session semantics with a dynamic “service session level ID.” It could deterministically change after a configured amount of inactive time. This would allow for every session to be a new identity while still being human-verified or age-verified — and the service wouldn’t even need to know about it. This is an acceptable risk, because services can still restrict account creation as-needed to profiles including PII attributes (e.g., for banking KYC). Services that don’t require PII can be scrutinized for any such requirements.

Interestingly too, what’s stopping this from working? If you have the infrastructure and it can be trusted as an identity provider, then it starts to look like a cost saving option. Services will integrate with it. Then the battle becomes getting it approved for things like banking.

But, above all else, it needs to be secure and trustworthy first.

Edit 3: it might be better to classify every usage of this identity layer. For example, if you use special hardware (e.g., local phone biometric reader) to authenticate your request to use your own wallet — then that particular callback should indicate “100% human” somehow. But if you just use your wallet by clicking a button on screen, then it should indicate “locally confirmed, but possibly scripted.”

This way, if a bot ever gets its hands on a wallet, the activity is still classified as the risk it presents. Humans, on the other hand, have a way (albeit slightly inconvenient) to fully certify any requests as human.

So the workflow starts looking like this:

Every authentication starts anonymous.

↓

Need age?

Reveal age only. [auth by local cert]

↓

Need account?

Opt into a stable pseudonym. [auth by local cert]
{can be service-stable or session-stable}

↓

Need legal identity?

Reveal legal identity. [auth by local cert]

↓

Need human?

Reveal humanity only. [auth by biometric]

Where profiles = groupings of attributes. You can select a profile as a way to log-in to a service. That service decides what to do based on the attributes you expose to it.

Profiles

○ Anonymous

    Human
    CAPTCHA-resistant

○ Adult

    Human
    Age >18

○ Banking

    Legal Name
    Address
    SSN
    KYC

○ Work

    Employer
    Department
    Employee #

○ Developer

    GitHub verified
    Email verified

○ Medical

    Medical License
    DEA registration

Services see something like this:

Authentication

Human Present:
YES

Verified by:
Secure Enclave

Biometric:
YES

PIN:
YES

Remote:
NO

Timestamp: ...

Attributes:
  - …

The service can simply decide: This proof corresponds to the same account as before. Now services model policy around risk and identity rather than just identity.

The full architecture could use blockchain for stable preservation of a persons attributes / certificates. But actually I don’t think that’s necessary either. If you offload risk onto the user, you can use this architecture too:

             Credential Issuers

 DMV      University      Bank      Employer
   │            │            │            │
   └────────────┴────────────┴────────────┘
                    │
          Signed Credentials
                    │
                    ▼
      +--------------------------+
      |      User Wallet         |
      |--------------------------|
      | Master Secret            |
      | Credentials              |
      | Attribute Profiles       |
      | Proof Generator          |
      +--------------------------+
                    │
     Pairwise IDs / Session IDs
     Zero-Knowledge Proofs
                    │
                    ▼
          Service Verification
                    │
      Learns only requested facts

No blockchain.

Unless you start using fancy little features that let you do things the others don’t do quite as well.

That’s me. Working local jobs with rather unambitious colleagues. I’ve worked for construction, property management, a digital marketplace, and professional services for retirees. All small local organizations. Only one of which with an internal dev team. None of which had any customer facing products in the analytical space.

My entire career has existed under the rock of entrepreneurial blindness toward disciplined engineering. Someone starts a business, it starts doing okay, and eventually they realize they have “too much data” and “don’t know what to do with it.” Then I come into the picture, saying all these big funny works like Governance, Catalog, … they hire me. I get their BI section working good enough that I get bored of being there. They eventually refuse to give me meaningful raises and I leave shortly after that.

Wish I had more money. I’ve gone from 60k -> 80k -> 85k -> 110k after each job transition. I’m still paycheck to paycheck with no savings and a car that only half runs.

What the fuck. Why can’t you disable such an expensive feature if you don’t want it?

Next up, I’ll be adding a Whirlwind Simulator in my Ice-cream shop. It’s a surcharge and it’s required before you step in.

What is the intensity that can’t be replicated, burn of the alcohol?

There is some evidence that will is preceded by action, not the other way around. Good point.

However, if the illusion is of agency—then it’s not really an illusion of consciousness. It’s more of a free will problem.

If the argument is that consciousness is only the misconception within an object that it has agency, then you’re still doing some magic handwaving. How did the object become capable of misconceiving anything? That would mean it was already conscious.

Edit: if the idea is that consciousness is only a behavioral pattern displayed by lifeforms with an internal self model, I’d need to think on that a bit. That’s pretty interesting.

I assume the claim would be that the experience of consciousness is one where a physically stateful information-processing system models itself, e.g., as a means to control its body or its behavior.

when it is instead a passive experience, a perception of control.

Right, like a blob of cells modeling its holistic self as one—assuming the identity of the model. Then believing, as the model, that they are in control of the model. Is that it?

Hmm. There’d still be quite a bit of explaining to do… like how a set of cells, none of which with the ability to model, identify, or believe suddenly contain these abilities en mass. That’s called emergence, which I think typically just means we misunderstand how something works.

I don’t understand why you think it’d be out of the question for it to have phenomoligcal experiences, why couldn’t we build a way for it to smell if it has the same pathways to be able to interpret that? How would that be meaningfully different?

The difference is having a phenomenological experience versus data processing. A phenomenological experience actually feels like something. We have literally no reason to believe phenomenology isn’t deeply dependent on the body. In fact, we probably have more evidence that it does depend on the body. Science doesn’t do a good job at justifying phenomenology though… and you aren’t going to conveniently recreate phenomenology using brute force via a technique that hinges itself on conveniently ignoring subjective information such as how things feel.

If your simulation has the “same pathways” to smell, congratulations—you just remade biological life. You made the nose, brain, and the connections between the two. If you didn’t do that, then you made a fancy copy cat machine. It doesn’t actually smell, not anymore than ChatGPT actually thinks.

Maybe you can give it a device that lets it convert air-born chemical signals into information it can act on. That’s a feature of intelligence though… not really a phenomenologically active experience. If you asked this intelligence machine “can you smell like I do?” I imagine it might respond, “no. I can process chemical information much like you do, but my ability to do so is based on data whereas yours is based on feeling or intuition.”

You literally cant experience the world like a computer would—without personal and phenomenal subjectivity. Equally so, a computer cant experience the world like you would. Even simulated, that’s not the same thing as feeling something.

Honestly, … I’m not saying this machine wouldn’t have applications. It very well may be like a supercharged LLM, for all I know. It’s just not human, no more than a Birch can ever be a Redwood.

I don’t understand why you think it’d be out of the question for it to have phenomenological experiences

Addressing that more specifically, I think it’s because I have yet to see a single scientific development in the wake of understanding the cause and nature of phenomenology. It’s ignored, rightfully so. Science doesn’t need to concern itself with phenomenology, at least hasn’t so far.

People have similarly argued that consciousness “arises” when an information machine is sufficiently complex. This claim of weak emergence seems ignorant to me; “arise” is doing a lot of magic handwaving. I’d argue it’s the same for phenomenology — you’re not going to stumble upon how to make a machine feel just by brute forcing more complexity.

Also, we should not be so naïve to think that understanding phenomenology is unnecessary for our goals [only because it’s not in the scientific spotlight]. Phenomenology is central to our experience and every other complex life forms experience (given a CNS).

Slime mold is intelligent, bear in mind. No nervous system, I’m doubtful it “feels” anything, but it’s intelligent. Imagine that you reprogrammed some slime mold to process information such that its external behavior perfectly resembled a human. It morphed into a humanoid shape, did human things… but you’d still say it’s not human. It’s all the intelligence, none of the humanity.

Would you consider my humanoid slime mold a “person?” You’re free to, but I think it’s arguable. My dog really connects with me… I don’t believe my slime mold would ever really connect with me.

At what point to you would it move from simulation to essentially the same configuration just in a different container?

Never.

Intelligence is substrate independent, and does not depend on consciousness or phenomenology. Phenomenology is probably substrate dependent, though. Meaning, the meatbag wrapped around our skeletal system really does matter. Phenomenology is also what makes us feel anything at all.

You can make all the intelligence you want, bootstrapping it off our neural architecture. You’re still doing us a disservice if you call it human. It’s more like a new species, with much more intelligence and virtually no phenomenological experience.

But calling it a new species is also arguable, because whether or not it would be “alive” is arguable. I’d just call it a neat toy.

Seems to me you think there’s something special about humans, I don’t believe there’s any proof to that.

I don’t, though. I get where you’re coming from, because I too often point out other people’s hidden assumptions about things like a soul or magic sauce to consciousness. I don’t subscribe. I follow something closer to a procedural understanding of consciousness.

that doesn’t mean it’s impossible to simulate.

I think it does. You aren’t going to simulate human consciousness if human consciousness is a procedure. At least, not how you’d simulate stock exchanges.

The difference is simulation versus synthesis. Your simulation would be a feed forward process and humans are not feed forward processes. Humans are phenomenologically driven entities. Your simulation would be a behaviorally consistent model at best — no phenomenology. Sorry to say, but that’s just not the same thing. It wouldn’t work the same way, wouldn’t feel the same, and you definitely wouldn’t have “figured out consciousness” just by building such a simulation. It would be a neat toy, like LLMs, but it wouldn’t be sentient. That’s obvious to me.

There’s no proof to a soul, our whole existence is our meat which evolved naturally over extreme timescales via random forces and natural selection, I see no reason to believe we could not do the same with our intelligence in a much shorter period of time comparatively.

Yeah, and I’m really not arguing for a soul. I’m arguing that simulation is subpar to recreation. If you simulated every neuron, you haven’t achieved anything really remarkable — except an awesome benchmark for computer power and a place in the history book. That’s it.

If you want a grand unifying theory of consciousness, you need to understand that phenomenology (the thing science ignores) is pretty damn central to the whole thing. That’s not arguing for a soul. That’s saying, pinch yourself — you are awake and you are not a robot.

Has the total value of mankind increased, meaning we can actually say we have more value for trillionaires to consume now than ever before — actual tangible value? Or would global wealth be more of a theoretical constant because it’s zero sum or something?

If that’s the case, by calling in an illusion, aren’t you just stating that it’s a misunderstood process?

Consciousness absolutely is something. That might be a procedural “thing,” and I think you’re saying that the notion of an ontological consciousness is a misconception. An Enlightenment Era misconception, if I’m allowed to add that in there…

To call it an illusion comes across as though you’re asserting what it is. I think you’re really just pointing out that it isnt what a lot of people consider it to be (often implicitly).

Is that fair?

This means there is no magic mystical difference between a real fly’s brain and a virtualized one.

That’s not true. You might simulate fly intelligence, but you aren’t simulating a fly. Flys are an entity driven by their phenomenological experience of the world (as all us nervous systems are). It would be a rather strange thing to say that a fly is only the pattern of behavior you recognize as a fly’s behavior.

Note that flies also have this capacity to self-evolve over generations. There is no single fly that you can point to and say, “that’s the right one. Copy It.” So, your “fly simulations” are always at best a behavioral approximation. Given enough time, say a decade or century, this ought be obvious by the fact that your simulation no longer accurately resembles the most modern flies.

Projecting further, there is no difference, other than scale, between our brain and the fly.

That’s just not true. Consider “What The Frog Eye Tells The Frog Brain.” Put briefly, the eye encodes and transmits semantic information — as opposed to the more common belief that it transmits raw visual information. That said, there a trillions of differences between how that might work in a human versus in a frog, let alone a fly.

I think you’ve discovered “neurons work similarly across species,” which is like saying “thing does same thing when used in other location.” This doesn’t tell you how neurons work to drive that behavior, it doesn’t tell you what it’s like to experience your neurons firing that way, it doesn’t tell you why the neurons were developed that way topologically over time… At best, it helps you develop a timebound understanding of fly automata to neural architecture. That’s without any understanding of phenomenology to neural architecture, and likely without being able to decompose the neural system into any semblance of semantic information processing.

A human is much more complex than a fly. I can’t believe for a second that this approach would work scale to a human’s brain. If you captured and simulated every neuron in the human brain, you’d be left with a feedforward process simulating a particular neural state of a particular person. No feeling, no reflection, no introspection, no semantic meaning. Just a neat toy.

An illusion is a phenomenological experience, for which you must be conscious. Consciousness can not be an illusion. You must be conscious to experience an illusion at all.

Leave your phone, dog, car, wallet, smart watch, hearing aids, headphones, and any other potentially “smart” / Bluetooth devices at home. If it can respond to a signal, like an RFID card in your wallet, then it should stay home.

I don’t know why, but your comment just inspired me to write a dystopian novel trilogy that hinges on being able to display a captcha where users must prove they are AI.

He’s busy getting fucked in the arse 24/7 so that you don’t have to, then goes and helps defend your right to own the shit you bought. That’s the face of a man of the people.

If there’s one thing I imagine this tech would be pretty good at, it would be profiling writing styles. Given enough samples, I don’t see why a personal account without ID wouldn’t be able to be mapped with high confidence to a corporate account with ID. Especially if connections come from the same region.

Thanks for the thorough reply!

What I’m gathering is that “wave” can refer to a behavioral pattern that is substrate independent — it refers to a logical function more than it does an ontological presence. That said, quantum waves are a substrate that exists beneath the material manifestations you and I experience (called a “wave” more-or-less for its mathematical properties)?

If that’s fair, would it be correct to call the quantum wave a “substrate” as I did?

and you know another thing about quantum field theory I don’t quite understand… I think it still depends on a four dimensional backdrop universe, for these fields to pervade. That fourth dimension is time, which is function of entropy. If time exists, that means the backdrop isn’t static — it evolves. That means it needs a fundamental explanation as well, something more than being just a background. No?

Should be a challenge, “how can I help Linux get there?” If more of the general public tech enthusiasts were interested in developing this out, I have no doubt it could be done in months time. Ref: be the change you want to see in the world.