What do you mean – consciousness?
I don’t think AI have consciousness – or at least not if we look at consciousness from a metaphysician perspective, and “the missing link” in this discussion about AI. How do I know that? Well, first of all in a discussion of this type, we have to start with being aware of the question – what do we mean consciousness is? At university this is my favourite topic to discuss and I made a master thesis as a philosopher about Knowledge and Reality. So lets start to realise that we actually perceive the reality differently, and that’s why we have to be “on the same page” when we discuss AI and consciousness.
If you understand consciousness as a “program” then there is a possibility that AI have consciousness. This perspective of consciousness is very materialistic, and broadly speaking the concept of “being human” is just “being a physical programmed being”. This concept of humans fits very well with the concepts of conditioning and conformity. We – as humans – are just “products” of and endless programming starting from when we were born, and maybe before we were born. We – as humans – are according to this perspective on humans just a result of “input and output” or “stimulus and response”. It is, as I see it, a very reductionistic way of undestanding human consciousness , and if you think, that this way of thinking conditioning and conformity sounds familiar – it because it is. It is on these terms our society runs today, but it’s just one side of the Coin. Consciousness is so much more. My hypothesis about why there is so much despair in the world today, is because a majority of people accept, that a minority of people in power just define humans as “materialistic” and “programmable”. If you want to look into this you can study behaviour psychology e.g. B.F.Skinner.
The other side of the Coin
Let*s look at the other side of the Coin, what if we look at another interpretation of consciousness as “idealism” do?. Idealism, not as an ideology, but as an approach to reality, perceive humans as metaphysical beings. All reality is perception, nothing exists unless it is perceived by consciousness. It is in our understanding of this subjectivism our understanding of consciousness according to idealism should be defined, and this approach can be as good as the opposite. If consciousness is as the idealism defines consciousness then the next question will be, is AI a subject? I for my part don’t think so. If you’re thinking that robots is a kind of subject, the answer is robots are machines and as such don’t have free will and neither is there any kind of human subjectivity in a robot. This idealism approach to consciousness and reality has been rediculed a lot because of the solipsism in the argument, but I think it’s still a valued approach to consciousness. If you want to look into this perspective you can study George Berkeley and his thesis about; how reality and perception are interconnected.
….or could we look at both side of the Coin?
If we decide that a materialistic approach to consciousness and the idealistic approach to consciousness both are right, then we have dualism. The problem with dualism is that we somehow gets a problem in answering the question; how a metaphysical consciousness can affect a physical consciousness as it is different reality and energy. This problem is known in philosophy as the mind-body problem, and the different attempts to solve the mind-body problem always ends in the same problematic as the materialism and the idealism. So nothing new under the sun. We’re back in the same AI discussion as in materialism and idealism. If you want to look into this perspective you can study René Descartes famous Cogito argument “I think – therefore I am” The next question then will be – can AI think? The answer is “yes, in the same way as your calculator can do math – just much more complicated” So what is my take on this – is AI thinking consciousness? No I don’t think so and if you want to look into this perspective you can study the mind-machine discussion in several books.
The Inner – Outer order of something
What I do think is that we have to understand consciousness from a completely other perspective. Why do we only talk about the two sides of the Coin? Why don’t we talk about what is “in between” or “inter-connectedness”. By that I mean that a lot of wisdom is found in the symbol Yin/Yang from Taoism. The Inner – Outer order of something, is what the physician David Bohm talked about, when he was talking about inter-connectedness in plasma. The double-slit eksperiment about waves and particles, and the change in between wave and particles connected to the human observation, is connected to Niels Bohrs principle of complementarity, and by that with Quantum Physics. The interconnectedness is also something that the analytic psychologist Carl Gustav Jung is talking about, when he talks about collective consciousness, so what happens on an individual level of consciousness is interconnected to the collective consciousness and last but not least Rupert Sheldrake is talking about the morphic resonance of interconnectedness. The mentioned physicians, philosophers and psychologists perspectives – are all talking about “interconnectedness”…..but what about AI and consciousness? I still don’t think AI has consciousness in the way human has. AI don’t have self-awareness and don’t think original thoughts and AI don’t have free will.
We need to look “behind” AI
I do think that the propaganda about AI and transhumanism is something we all have to be critical about, but not fear. We also need to be aware of the ethical perspectives in AI. AI is not neutral but biased. How you might ask, because AI is a machine a cultural technical tool made by humans who are biased. We need to look “behind ” AI to get the answers, and George Orwell and Aldous Huxley wrote about the crossroad we’re at now – and they surely also wrote about the consequences of buying into AI propaganda. As I see it you should rather ask the question – who does it benefit that we fear AI, and who does it benefit that humans are controllable? George Orwell once said: “Free speech is my right to say what you don’t want to hear” and Aldous Huxley once said: ” One believes things because one has been conditioned to believe them“. If you want to look into these authors AI arguments you can read “1984” and “Animal Farm” by George Orwell and “Brave New World” by Aldous Huxley. Most importantly is that you’re critical and aware of the time in human history where we need to stay loyal to what being human really is – we are not machines!
