AI has undeniably made progress; systems like DALL-E and Stable Diffusion are impressive, surprising, and fun to play with. We can all agree on that. But can the current state of AI be criticized? A lot of recent media accounts have tried to stick AI critics in a little box. Scientists like the linguist

Neural networks need to “dream” of weird, senseless examples to learn well. Maybe we do, too.Photo Illustration by MDV Edwards…

For an empirical science, physics can be remarkably dismissive of some of our most basic observations. We see objects existing in definite locations, but the wave nature of matter washes that away. We perceive time to flow, but how could it, really? We feel ourselves to be free agents, and that's just quaint. Physicists like nothing better than to expose our view of the universe as parochial. But when asked why our impressions are so off, they mumble some excuse and slip out the side door of the party. Physicists, in other words, face the same hard problem of consciousness as neuroscientists do: the problem of bridging objective description and subjective experience. To relate fundamental theory to what we actually observe in the world, they must explain what it means "to observe"--to become conscious of. And they tend to be slapdash about it. They divide the world into "system" and "observer," study the former intensely, and take the latter for granted--or, worse, for a fool.

There you are, sitting front row of Miss Ryan's English class in your underwear, when in walks Chris Hemsworth holding a saxophone in one hand and a turtle in the other, asking you to play in his band. "Why not?" you say, taking the turtle before snapping awake in a cold sweat, the darkness pressing in as you whisper to yourself, "…WTF?" Decades – if not centuries – of psychological analysis have ventured to explain why it is our imaginations go on strange, unconstrained journeys while we sleep, with the general consensus being it has to do with processing experiences from our waking hours. That's all well and good, but seriously, do they have to be so … well, bizarre? Neuroscientist Erik Hoel from Tufts University has taken inspiration from the way we teach neural networks to recognize patterns, arguing the very experience of dreaming is its own purpose, and its weirdness might be a feature, not a bug.

Psychologists, neuroscientists and others have pondered the origin and role of dreams for time immemorial. Freud suggested that they were a way of expressing frustrations associated with taboos -- an idea that has long been discredited. Others have suggested dreams are a kind of emotional thermostat that allow us to control and resolve emotional conflicts. However, critics point out that most dreams lack strong emotional content and that emotionally neutral dreams are common. Still others say dreams are part of the process the brain uses to fix memories or to selectively forget unwanted or unneeded memories.

Using the mathematical language of information theory, Hoel and his collaborators claim to show that new causes--things that produce effects--can emerge at macroscopic scales. They say coarse-grained macroscopic states of a physical system (such as the psychological state of a brain) can have more causal power over the system's future than a more detailed, fine-grained description of the system possibly could. Just as codes reduce noise (and thus uncertainty) in transmitted data--Claude Shannon's 1948 insight that formed the bedrock of information theory--Hoel claims that macro states also reduce noise and uncertainty in a system's causal structure, strengthening causal relationships and making the system's behavior more deterministic. With Albantakis and Tononi, Hoel formalized a measure of causal power called "effective information," which indicates how effectively a particular state influences the future state of a system.

For an empirical science, physics can be remarkably dismissive of some of our most basic observations. We see objects existing in definite locations, but the wave nature of matter washes that away. We perceive time to flow, but how could it, really? We feel ourselves to be free agents, and that's just quaint. Physicists like nothing better than to expose our view of the universe as parochial. But when asked why our impressions are so off, they mumble some excuse and slip out the side door of the party. Physicists, in other words, face the same hard problem of consciousness as neuroscientists do: the problem of bridging objective description and subjective experience. To relate fundamental theory to what we actually observe in the world, they must explain what it means "to observe"--to become conscious of. And they tend to be slapdash about it. They divide the world into "system" and "observer," study the former intensely, and take the latter for granted--or, worse, for a fool.