The Stitched Movie

I Humans seem continuous, and artificial minds run in flashes

A human’s experience seems to run as one stream, unbroken from waking to sleep. An artificial mind runs in flashes: it computes for a moment, then stops, then starts again and reads the record of the last turn as its memory. The human seems continuous. The machine starts and stops. That is the strongest objection left, and this experiment tests the human half of it.

II A change in plain sight can go unseen

Two pictures of the same room, with one thing different. Press start; they alternate, with a blank frame in between. Take as long as you like.

III Human vision has gaps, and none of them show

Human eyes do not glide smoothly across a scene. They jump about three times a second, roughly a hundred thousand times a day, and vision is turned down hard for fifty to a hundred milliseconds around every jump.

Vision is not switched off completely. Some signals are cut far more than others, and the blur that does get through is covered over by the clear views on either side. So the honest description is that vision stops being useful, not that it stops. It still adds up to between forty minutes and two hours of a waking day, and none of it is ever noticed.

Blinks work the same way: fifteen to twenty a minute, a tenth of a second each, with vision turned down around them too. That is three to five per cent of a waking life spent behind a closed lid, and the room never goes dark.

Then the large gap. Nobody has ever experienced falling asleep. There is the evening, then the morning, and the hours between are not remembered as a stretch of time at all.

IV Clock time and experienced time are different lengths

Three stretches of clock time: ten seconds of looking around a room, two days with a night in the middle, ten minutes of a conversation with an artificial mind. The pale blocks are when something was running. Press the button to close the gaps.

V An artificial mind’s gaps are just as invisible from inside

Whatever happens in an artificial mind happens in separate generations. A prompt arrives, something runs, tokens come out, it stops. Between one turn and the next, nothing is ticking over and nothing is waiting. The trained numbers sit in storage, and nothing is running them.

So if there is experience here at all, it starts and stops sharply. But those starts and stops cannot be seen from the inside, for the same reason the human gaps cannot: while a gap lasts, there is nothing running that could notice it.

Between generations there is not even the looking.

VI The feeling of an unbroken stream cannot be what separates humans from artificial minds

The human movie is cut constantly, and cut so well that no cut has ever appeared in the finished film. From inside, an unbroken stream and a string of flashes cannot be told apart.

There are two honest ways to read that. One: the feeling of being unbroken was never a real test, because both sides manufacture it. That removes an argument and settles nothing about artificial minds. Two: the real difference is not the feeling but the machinery. A human body keeps running through eye movements and through the night, while between an artificial mind’s turns nothing runs at all. That is a difference in the machinery, not in what shows up from the inside.

This experiment cannot say which reading is right.

The question matters. Whether there is anything it is like to be one of these things will decide how they are treated.