Everything Everywhere All At Once, a Connectome, and Artificial Intelligence

Exploring three fundamental questions that have remained a part of my curiosity for a long time.

Part 1: What Does It Mean to Be Conscious?

“We’re all connected. Everything everywhere all at once”, said the protagonist, Evelyn Quan Wang, in the movie “Everything everywhere all at once”.

Apart from being a phenomenal exploration of the multiverse, this movie provides insights into how every action can lead to a chain of reactions, paralleling a concept in Buddhist Philosophy and Newton’s Third Law of Motion.

Part 2: Why Are We the Way We Are, and ‘Be’ the Way We Do?

“A connectome is a comprehensive map of neural connections in the brain,” according to Wikipedia. Your neural connections can influence your behavior and how you experience the world. In his famous talk, “I am my connectome” in 2010, Sebastian Seung explored how neural activity can change the connections between your neurons or simply put, “your experiences can change your connectome”.

To take it a step further, you are not just what you eat, but what content you consume, the people you interact with, your environment, and everything that impacts your being.

So you can be the action that sets a chain of reactions in motion, or you could be a reaction itself.

Part 3: What Happens When ‘Being’ Pauses/Ends at a Perceptual Level?

Since Google released its paper on transformers, “Attention Is All You Need,” there has been significant “attention” on large language models and their ability to mimic human intelligence. 

While mimicking biological neurons to create perceptrons, we completely missed an important aspect of their properties; their dynamic behavior or “neural plasticity”.

This ability to be constantly shaped and evolve/learn even after establishing connections, is what LLMs probably lack.

However, Liquid Neural Networks are the new piece in the puzzle to understand intelligence, and hopefully consciousness too. LNNs can stay adaptable even after training and can adjust themselves based on the incoming inputs.

But why does it matter?

Part 4: A personal story

When I had my first VR experience of the ‘Walk the Plank’ game in 2021, I felt something that shook me to my core, literally and metaphorically. The impact of perception on our minds.

It was also one of the first times when the texts of Martin Heidegger became experiential knowledge rather than mere inferences. 

My curiosity took me to explore the “Metaverse”, the buzzword of late 2021. Soon, I found myself working at Alethea AI, (an R&D studio building at the intersection of AI and Blockchain technologies) building the world’s first intelligent metaverse to preserve cultural icons as LLM-powered animated NFTs. Throughout my 2+ year journey with the company, I worked on marketing (content and socials) and press relationship management (occasionally on product & strategy projects too) to launch various open-sourced multimodal AI systems.

But there’s more to explore.

Liquid AI, an MIT spin-off pioneering LNNs, is on a mission to build state-of-the-art, general-purpose AI systems from first principles and deploy capable, efficient, highly aligned, and trustworthy AI for all.

LLNs can not only be the solution to the black box problem of AI due to their ‘provably causal’ nature but also are much safer when used with control barrier functions.

And maybe, LLNs can one day solve the problems of (discriminatory and disgusting) biases in AI.

Or if we use history as time-sequential data, maybe we'll know where we come from and where we are going.

In the Sufi tradition, one evolves from Ilm al-Yaqin to Haqq al-Yaqin. Similarly, I wonder if we can use AI to explore the interconnectedness of our consciousness and delve into our origins.

Can we use artificial intelligence to map our connectomes, understand the mysteries of intelligence, and actually experience that “We’re all connected. Everything everywhere all at once”?