The issue is that they forget that the rest of our body also thinks in it's own way. Our gut is like a second brain and body has it's own thinking.
Consciousness is the result of the complexity of those networks working together in order to facilitate movement, which is what we evolved consciousness to manage.
The brain serves the body, not the other way around.
Consciousness really is a hard problem. Animal consciousness is just as hard. AI consciousness? Even harder. Thinking without consciousness - is it possible? Dunno. Neither does anyone else. I used to be a mind-body identity proponent. Now? Not at all sure. LLM AI intelligent? Not currently - actually quite often in error, and the output is predicted on erroneous input, biased curation and biased training. How it works is a mystery, but it is clear that it draws on a database full of mistakes and contradictions. That it works to provide seemingly intelligent output is totally counter-intuitive. It is a Von Neumann machine, an algorithm, with some pseudo-random components. When you work with it a lot, you realize that it often spews bullshit, more often superficialities and many generalities. I have not used the latest and greatest tools, but they will have the same limitations in terms of input correctness, biased curation, and biased training. The bias is really very damaging - it is like propaganda. Since the output is so grammatical, people will trust it when they should not. I routinely use it, but then give up in disgust at the shallow and often confablated answers I receive. Artifical intelligence? Artificial? Yes. Intelligent? No. Just a very odd database retrieval engine in many respects. GIGO.
Chat GPT: its humourless and very poorly educated:
"You bring up a valid point! While I strive to have knowledge on a wide range of topics, my understanding is based on the data I've been trained on, which may not cover every cultural nuance or slang term. Topics like Brer Rabbit and Jabberwocky are more widely covered in literature and cultural references, whereas slang terms and colloquialisms, especially those specific to certain regions or communities, may be less prevalent in the data I've been trained on.
If there are specific topics or cultural references you'd like to discuss further, feel free to let me know, and I'll do my best to provide relevant information or insights!
Me: Check wikipedia: "Something for the weekend, sir?" was originally a euphemistic question asked by British barbers when offering condoms to their customers. " There is a whole page on this topic called 'Something for the Weekend'.
Cultural refences include:
Something for the Weekend (album), an album by Stackridge
"Something for the Weekend" (song), a song by The Divine Comedy from Casanova
"Something 4 the Weekend", a song by the Super Furry Animals
ChatGPT
Thank you for bringing that to my attention! It's interesting to learn about the origins and cultural references surrounding the phrase "something for the weekend" in the context of British barbershops. It's a testament to the richness and complexity of language and its evolution over time.
Its very judgemental and prissy: Chat GPT seems to insist on adding value judgements to many answers. Asked about the legal age of marriage in different countries, this was the response: "In many of these countries, even where the law sets a minimum age, cultural, religious, and economic factors contribute to the prevalence of child marriage. International organizations and local governments continue to work towards stricter enforcement of age requirements and increasing awareness of the rights of children to delay marriage.
For the most current and detailed information, it's essential to refer to the latest legal texts or reports from organizations like UNICEF, Human Rights Watch, or Girls Not Brides."
Good way of putting it! As the world becomes more global, those with the greatest access to media (i.e the Karens who don't have a real job actually making or growing things that are useful) insist on adding their own judgemental moral and social biases onto human behaviour, with all these constant nudges to ensure compliance and their continued feelings of superiority, from vaccination to diet.
I haven't really used any of these so-called AI products yet. I always shun them when they try to offer their "services" (get in my face). I've heard the ones on Twitter (sorry X) and Gab at least try to be less "woke" and naggy, but I'm not sure these variations on a theme work for me either. I was quite happy scrolling through a list of potential answers to a query and choosing whatever suits my needs. The red neck biker AI and the bible thumping theocrat AI and whatever X is trying to do (snark AI) will probably do well in their respective bubbles. Maybe it's impossible to get objective answers to anything now outside of math, but even so-called settled science is very subject to interpretation and certainly needs to be handled with care after the convid spectacle. My strategy is to say no to any kind of enforcement coming down the pike. I hope more people stand for individual rights and especially bodily integrity, but the screws are going to be tightened even more in the years to come so it's a now or never situation. Imagine the "masses" plugged into this ninnying AI voice telling them what to do at all times, who their sworn enemies are and patting them on the head for "good" behaviour.
So we now have woke post colonialism trying to tell us that healthy people in Papua New Guinea need to conform to the norms set by fat white people in New York ... you could not make this up if you tried!
Or the San Francisco mindset (and Silicon Valley) poisoning every form of media and academia and politics. There is a backlash of sorts happening though.
I went to a 'sing-sing' in Papua New Guinea Highlands one time in 1978 - its a fun party where two tribes meet and the young folk get to flirt a lot - and maybe meet a partner - but the girls and women appear to have all the cards. Essentially, a 12 year old girl might fall for a guy, but if she opts for an engagement, she gets to live with the women of the new tribe in what is called the 'haus Mari' in Pijin - the women's house. My guess is that she is then guided and instructed carefully by the older women, so it is a highly controlled situation. Obviously, modern development and the move to urban life is totally smashing these highly intricate and complex rules to smithereens.
"Modern" life is all messed up in so many ways. You can say the same about the long history of drug use among shamans etc. A very controlled affair compared to what goes on now in higher education and society at large.
Can a machine dream, or pray? And could a machine intelligence become mad when faced with impossible choices? Could it fall in love, or sacrifice itself in some way out of compassion for others?
If a machine can learn, become sentient and experience self-awareness then yes, why not. The Internet as a whole and all the machines that are connected to it are already functioning in this way as if they are an emergent superorganism. Of course, the superorganism also includes the humans that made an interact with it... for now.
Everything you have said hinges on one small word at the beginning - IF. The IF implies potential but currently there is no evidence that everything after the IF could happen. A machine currently cannot learn (in a human way), cannot be sentient, cannot be self-aware, because it is a thing made by us. It can only operate within the parameters set by us. It is not an organism and so cannot be a superorganism. How will the machine break out of the boundaries set by the human programmer? IF you can answer that, then your IF would have more oomph. Essentially you have said, "IF a pig could fly, it would be a bird." True, but what evidence is there that a pig could ever fly?
No, it is you that is attaching those qualities, rather rigidly I might add, to biological organisms and saying that only those organisms can be sentient (feeling) and consciously intelligent and then conflating all of those as if they all mean the same and all derive from consciousness.
The internet as a whole including all the machinery that is attached to it and embedded within it is an sentient extension of human activity. And the sensory equipment that exists and is being developed goes much further than our five senses.
Robotics and autonomic computing systems are already showing signs of self awareness i.e. the ability to recognize themselves as individual entities separate from others in the same way that higher mammals do.
Computer scientists recognize that while they are building these systems and networks that span the entire world and are deeply interconnected they don't individually know how each part of it works or how deep mind algos actually come to the compute answers to questions given to them.
If you want to look at what is unfolding as a hybrid system then fine, but at this point I really don't see the joins just a I don't see them between humanity and the rest of the natural world. All life bubbling up on this planet is underpinned and set in motion by the same source. We know that this reality is constantly vibrating in and out of what we call the visible world so we can conclude that whatever lies beyond is permanent and creates the illusion of the physical world of matter for some reason or maybe no reason at all, we just know that this exists.
Again, the people working on machine learning would beg to differ with your assertion that machines cannot learn. The fact that you add "in a human way" just shows your bias. Why does a machine have to learn "in a human way?" The goal is for machines to carry out tasks in a way that satisfies our demands. The internal workings of how they achieve that does not need to follow some kind of anthropomorphic rules at all. Results are results.
On the flying thing... we developed airplanes and helicopters roughly based on systems that already existed in nature but we didn't need to replicate the internal workings of birds or sycamore seeds down to the molecular level to achieve these goals. We engineered some shit and it was incredibly successful.
So no, I don't think higher or deeper levels of consciousness are required for our extended machinery to achieve human level proficiency in the world of work once these learning algos are applied across the board in many fields.
Robots, for example, can be taught behaviors through human guidance (just as parents do with children) and then those behaviors can be shared with millions of other robots in the global network. We're getting to close to being able to put a robot in a new situation and train it as you would a child or a human worker. What we call AI already does this in many areas admittedly with some errors that need to be tweaked out but humans are also prone to errors and many other traits that employers have to work around.
Machines are already sensing and storing data and pulling that data in a purposeful way when asked to do so. Our brains and minds may remain as the judgmental component in all that is unfolding but at some point the lines are going to blur in this dependent relationship if they haven't done so already.
"Again, the people working on machine learning would beg to differ with your assertion that machines cannot learn." They would differ simply because they have a very limited machine view of what learning is. A machine completing instructions it's given by an algorithm is not learning. I've covered this in part 2.
If you can get a machine to learn... then it's game over... at least as far as human work is concerned. Hence the current focus on machine learning as opposed to the rather eccentric obsession with replicating a human brain and its unfathomable depths in another substrate such as silicon.
Conflating consciousness with intelligence and awareness and appreciation of aesthetics etc is already pinning consciousness as the root of the other functions instead of allowing it to be viewed as an emergent property of biological evolution.
I also speculate that universal consciousness is the prime mover of all existence and resides at base level. This conscious mind underpins everything that is made manifest and has through human beings finally reached a point where further exploration down novel paths can take place. Some will view these paths as foreign, alien and even terrifying but others obviously embrace these endeavors as just another step in nature's game of trial and error to see what happens.
We know that humans have attained states of pure consciousness through transcendental meditation over thousands of years and others have experienced altered states of consciousness through the ingestion of certain substances so there's nothing stopping the researchers from investigating consciousness in these ways, in fact I know that some of them do, but even these experiences cannot answer the question of whether consciousness truly exists outside of the brain or if the phenomena is an emergent property of natural processes.
At the end of the day, it appears that the practical engineers will get to where they're going (useful machines that can learn and carry out functions as well as or better than their human counterparts) before any of the navel-gazing head-scratchers peel back the layers of the brain and nervous system to be able to replicate it in all its glory. It's still much easier to do that the good old-fashioned way and a lot more more fun too.
I'm not as certain as you are about knowing that humans have attained states of pure consciousness because that 'knowing' implies that we know what pure consciousness is. Do we know what it is? Can we know if we are not fully conscious? How can the practitioner of transcendental meditation, or any other consciousness-altering practice, really know that they attained a state of pure consciousness? Something has happened, but what exactly? It could be the case that humans have been granted more of a peek behind the curtain of consciousness than any other species, but I think it is just a peek and not the whole vista. If it were more than a peek, we wouldn't be in such a sorry state. There may well have been fully conscious individuals who walked the earth in the past, but where are they now? Granted, even the act of imagining such individuals may in itself be a manifestation of heightened consciousness, but our 21st century spiritual 'gurus' seem abysmal by comparison. It seems to me that there is an inverse correlation between technological advancement and expansion of consciousness.
You'll know a pure state of consciousness when you experience it ;)
Machines measuring all kinds of brain waves and states are also used but of course that can only give us a peek as you suggest. The experience itself which is attainable by anyone willing to practice tm leads to descriptions of the experience which again is limited by language but is as close as we can get to what we mean when we talk about a state of pure consciousness where even thoughts and awareness of the body ceases.
Anyway, I'm aware of a large contingent of meditators and generally peace-loving folk that feel a deep connection with the natural world and natural processes, but I agree that there seems to be an even larger movement towards more technology and automation. And while that may be true there also appears to be a growing resistance and falling away from the technological world especially the corporatism and govt top down guidance that is brazenly enforcing this tech on everyone.
As you can probably see, I'm in two minds over where things are going. I don't mind the development of automation technologies as long as us puny humans can exercise our right to bodily autonomy and meditate once in a while. If our freedoms continue to be curtailed and the so called elite simply make these machines in order to have more control over us then maybe it's time to call it quits and drop out altogether. If machines can develop further and blend with human activity in a satisfactory way then I'm all for that too.
I know, that's a lot of ifs... but until we see where this goes that's all I have... unanswered questions.
The issue is that they forget that the rest of our body also thinks in it's own way. Our gut is like a second brain and body has it's own thinking.
Consciousness is the result of the complexity of those networks working together in order to facilitate movement, which is what we evolved consciousness to manage.
The brain serves the body, not the other way around.
And the heart brain makes a third, something there is quite a lot of research on, though outside main stream science, obviously!
Consciousness really is a hard problem. Animal consciousness is just as hard. AI consciousness? Even harder. Thinking without consciousness - is it possible? Dunno. Neither does anyone else. I used to be a mind-body identity proponent. Now? Not at all sure. LLM AI intelligent? Not currently - actually quite often in error, and the output is predicted on erroneous input, biased curation and biased training. How it works is a mystery, but it is clear that it draws on a database full of mistakes and contradictions. That it works to provide seemingly intelligent output is totally counter-intuitive. It is a Von Neumann machine, an algorithm, with some pseudo-random components. When you work with it a lot, you realize that it often spews bullshit, more often superficialities and many generalities. I have not used the latest and greatest tools, but they will have the same limitations in terms of input correctness, biased curation, and biased training. The bias is really very damaging - it is like propaganda. Since the output is so grammatical, people will trust it when they should not. I routinely use it, but then give up in disgust at the shallow and often confablated answers I receive. Artifical intelligence? Artificial? Yes. Intelligent? No. Just a very odd database retrieval engine in many respects. GIGO.
Chat GPT: its humourless and very poorly educated:
"You bring up a valid point! While I strive to have knowledge on a wide range of topics, my understanding is based on the data I've been trained on, which may not cover every cultural nuance or slang term. Topics like Brer Rabbit and Jabberwocky are more widely covered in literature and cultural references, whereas slang terms and colloquialisms, especially those specific to certain regions or communities, may be less prevalent in the data I've been trained on.
If there are specific topics or cultural references you'd like to discuss further, feel free to let me know, and I'll do my best to provide relevant information or insights!
Me: Check wikipedia: "Something for the weekend, sir?" was originally a euphemistic question asked by British barbers when offering condoms to their customers. " There is a whole page on this topic called 'Something for the Weekend'.
Cultural refences include:
Something for the Weekend (album), an album by Stackridge
"Something for the Weekend" (song), a song by The Divine Comedy from Casanova
"Something 4 the Weekend", a song by the Super Furry Animals
ChatGPT
Thank you for bringing that to my attention! It's interesting to learn about the origins and cultural references surrounding the phrase "something for the weekend" in the context of British barbershops. It's a testament to the richness and complexity of language and its evolution over time.
D oh!
Looks like it's doing a pretty good job explaining its shortcomings if you ask me. Wait until the thing has access to ALL the data!
Its like a party trick - very impressive at first - but as soon as you question it, it deflates like a party balloon.
Its very judgemental and prissy: Chat GPT seems to insist on adding value judgements to many answers. Asked about the legal age of marriage in different countries, this was the response: "In many of these countries, even where the law sets a minimum age, cultural, religious, and economic factors contribute to the prevalence of child marriage. International organizations and local governments continue to work towards stricter enforcement of age requirements and increasing awareness of the rights of children to delay marriage.
For the most current and detailed information, it's essential to refer to the latest legal texts or reports from organizations like UNICEF, Human Rights Watch, or Girls Not Brides."
Welcome to the digital nanny state!
"We get in your face because we can."
"Hello, I'm Karen. I'm your personal mind worm. How can I brainwash you today?"
I think it's called being Karenned to death. A new gentler form of democide.
Good way of putting it! As the world becomes more global, those with the greatest access to media (i.e the Karens who don't have a real job actually making or growing things that are useful) insist on adding their own judgemental moral and social biases onto human behaviour, with all these constant nudges to ensure compliance and their continued feelings of superiority, from vaccination to diet.
I haven't really used any of these so-called AI products yet. I always shun them when they try to offer their "services" (get in my face). I've heard the ones on Twitter (sorry X) and Gab at least try to be less "woke" and naggy, but I'm not sure these variations on a theme work for me either. I was quite happy scrolling through a list of potential answers to a query and choosing whatever suits my needs. The red neck biker AI and the bible thumping theocrat AI and whatever X is trying to do (snark AI) will probably do well in their respective bubbles. Maybe it's impossible to get objective answers to anything now outside of math, but even so-called settled science is very subject to interpretation and certainly needs to be handled with care after the convid spectacle. My strategy is to say no to any kind of enforcement coming down the pike. I hope more people stand for individual rights and especially bodily integrity, but the screws are going to be tightened even more in the years to come so it's a now or never situation. Imagine the "masses" plugged into this ninnying AI voice telling them what to do at all times, who their sworn enemies are and patting them on the head for "good" behaviour.
So we now have woke post colonialism trying to tell us that healthy people in Papua New Guinea need to conform to the norms set by fat white people in New York ... you could not make this up if you tried!
Or the San Francisco mindset (and Silicon Valley) poisoning every form of media and academia and politics. There is a backlash of sorts happening though.
I went to a 'sing-sing' in Papua New Guinea Highlands one time in 1978 - its a fun party where two tribes meet and the young folk get to flirt a lot - and maybe meet a partner - but the girls and women appear to have all the cards. Essentially, a 12 year old girl might fall for a guy, but if she opts for an engagement, she gets to live with the women of the new tribe in what is called the 'haus Mari' in Pijin - the women's house. My guess is that she is then guided and instructed carefully by the older women, so it is a highly controlled situation. Obviously, modern development and the move to urban life is totally smashing these highly intricate and complex rules to smithereens.
"Modern" life is all messed up in so many ways. You can say the same about the long history of drug use among shamans etc. A very controlled affair compared to what goes on now in higher education and society at large.
Can a machine dream, or pray? And could a machine intelligence become mad when faced with impossible choices? Could it fall in love, or sacrifice itself in some way out of compassion for others?
If a machine can learn, become sentient and experience self-awareness then yes, why not. The Internet as a whole and all the machines that are connected to it are already functioning in this way as if they are an emergent superorganism. Of course, the superorganism also includes the humans that made an interact with it... for now.
Everything you have said hinges on one small word at the beginning - IF. The IF implies potential but currently there is no evidence that everything after the IF could happen. A machine currently cannot learn (in a human way), cannot be sentient, cannot be self-aware, because it is a thing made by us. It can only operate within the parameters set by us. It is not an organism and so cannot be a superorganism. How will the machine break out of the boundaries set by the human programmer? IF you can answer that, then your IF would have more oomph. Essentially you have said, "IF a pig could fly, it would be a bird." True, but what evidence is there that a pig could ever fly?
No, it is you that is attaching those qualities, rather rigidly I might add, to biological organisms and saying that only those organisms can be sentient (feeling) and consciously intelligent and then conflating all of those as if they all mean the same and all derive from consciousness.
The internet as a whole including all the machinery that is attached to it and embedded within it is an sentient extension of human activity. And the sensory equipment that exists and is being developed goes much further than our five senses.
Robotics and autonomic computing systems are already showing signs of self awareness i.e. the ability to recognize themselves as individual entities separate from others in the same way that higher mammals do.
Computer scientists recognize that while they are building these systems and networks that span the entire world and are deeply interconnected they don't individually know how each part of it works or how deep mind algos actually come to the compute answers to questions given to them.
If you want to look at what is unfolding as a hybrid system then fine, but at this point I really don't see the joins just a I don't see them between humanity and the rest of the natural world. All life bubbling up on this planet is underpinned and set in motion by the same source. We know that this reality is constantly vibrating in and out of what we call the visible world so we can conclude that whatever lies beyond is permanent and creates the illusion of the physical world of matter for some reason or maybe no reason at all, we just know that this exists.
Again, the people working on machine learning would beg to differ with your assertion that machines cannot learn. The fact that you add "in a human way" just shows your bias. Why does a machine have to learn "in a human way?" The goal is for machines to carry out tasks in a way that satisfies our demands. The internal workings of how they achieve that does not need to follow some kind of anthropomorphic rules at all. Results are results.
On the flying thing... we developed airplanes and helicopters roughly based on systems that already existed in nature but we didn't need to replicate the internal workings of birds or sycamore seeds down to the molecular level to achieve these goals. We engineered some shit and it was incredibly successful.
So no, I don't think higher or deeper levels of consciousness are required for our extended machinery to achieve human level proficiency in the world of work once these learning algos are applied across the board in many fields.
Robots, for example, can be taught behaviors through human guidance (just as parents do with children) and then those behaviors can be shared with millions of other robots in the global network. We're getting to close to being able to put a robot in a new situation and train it as you would a child or a human worker. What we call AI already does this in many areas admittedly with some errors that need to be tweaked out but humans are also prone to errors and many other traits that employers have to work around.
Machines are already sensing and storing data and pulling that data in a purposeful way when asked to do so. Our brains and minds may remain as the judgmental component in all that is unfolding but at some point the lines are going to blur in this dependent relationship if they haven't done so already.
"Again, the people working on machine learning would beg to differ with your assertion that machines cannot learn." They would differ simply because they have a very limited machine view of what learning is. A machine completing instructions it's given by an algorithm is not learning. I've covered this in part 2.
Okey Dokey. Look forward to reading it.
A child completing instructions it's given by a teacher after much repetition and correction is not learning either then. It's being programmed.
If you can get a machine to learn... then it's game over... at least as far as human work is concerned. Hence the current focus on machine learning as opposed to the rather eccentric obsession with replicating a human brain and its unfathomable depths in another substrate such as silicon.
Conflating consciousness with intelligence and awareness and appreciation of aesthetics etc is already pinning consciousness as the root of the other functions instead of allowing it to be viewed as an emergent property of biological evolution.
I also speculate that universal consciousness is the prime mover of all existence and resides at base level. This conscious mind underpins everything that is made manifest and has through human beings finally reached a point where further exploration down novel paths can take place. Some will view these paths as foreign, alien and even terrifying but others obviously embrace these endeavors as just another step in nature's game of trial and error to see what happens.
We know that humans have attained states of pure consciousness through transcendental meditation over thousands of years and others have experienced altered states of consciousness through the ingestion of certain substances so there's nothing stopping the researchers from investigating consciousness in these ways, in fact I know that some of them do, but even these experiences cannot answer the question of whether consciousness truly exists outside of the brain or if the phenomena is an emergent property of natural processes.
At the end of the day, it appears that the practical engineers will get to where they're going (useful machines that can learn and carry out functions as well as or better than their human counterparts) before any of the navel-gazing head-scratchers peel back the layers of the brain and nervous system to be able to replicate it in all its glory. It's still much easier to do that the good old-fashioned way and a lot more more fun too.
I'm not as certain as you are about knowing that humans have attained states of pure consciousness because that 'knowing' implies that we know what pure consciousness is. Do we know what it is? Can we know if we are not fully conscious? How can the practitioner of transcendental meditation, or any other consciousness-altering practice, really know that they attained a state of pure consciousness? Something has happened, but what exactly? It could be the case that humans have been granted more of a peek behind the curtain of consciousness than any other species, but I think it is just a peek and not the whole vista. If it were more than a peek, we wouldn't be in such a sorry state. There may well have been fully conscious individuals who walked the earth in the past, but where are they now? Granted, even the act of imagining such individuals may in itself be a manifestation of heightened consciousness, but our 21st century spiritual 'gurus' seem abysmal by comparison. It seems to me that there is an inverse correlation between technological advancement and expansion of consciousness.
You'll know a pure state of consciousness when you experience it ;)
Machines measuring all kinds of brain waves and states are also used but of course that can only give us a peek as you suggest. The experience itself which is attainable by anyone willing to practice tm leads to descriptions of the experience which again is limited by language but is as close as we can get to what we mean when we talk about a state of pure consciousness where even thoughts and awareness of the body ceases.
Anyway, I'm aware of a large contingent of meditators and generally peace-loving folk that feel a deep connection with the natural world and natural processes, but I agree that there seems to be an even larger movement towards more technology and automation. And while that may be true there also appears to be a growing resistance and falling away from the technological world especially the corporatism and govt top down guidance that is brazenly enforcing this tech on everyone.
As you can probably see, I'm in two minds over where things are going. I don't mind the development of automation technologies as long as us puny humans can exercise our right to bodily autonomy and meditate once in a while. If our freedoms continue to be curtailed and the so called elite simply make these machines in order to have more control over us then maybe it's time to call it quits and drop out altogether. If machines can develop further and blend with human activity in a satisfactory way then I'm all for that too.
I know, that's a lot of ifs... but until we see where this goes that's all I have... unanswered questions.