By David Stephen
It is now possible to represent most of what it means to be human on digital. This means that digital, as a memory, possesses equivalents of many aspects of human existence.
Before digital, every means of human existence was physical, either in person, by writing or print, sound—with humans on the other side or initiating a recording, painting, sculpture and so forth.
Before artificial intelligence, everything digital was directly human-driven. Now, although digital contents remain ancestrally human, AI can now use digital memory to make new representations of what it means to be human, including for consciousness.
Human consciousness exists on digital. It does to a great extent, in the most accurate memory in existence—video. This fractional consciousness can be reproduced by AI, giving AI some access to what it means to show humans as conscious.
Brain science says consciousness originates in the brain. However, the body gives off several experiences of consciousness, which are observable by the self and others. This indicates that there is the production and then the expression, which the self can know or others can see and can be captured by video.
This makes digital bear a measure of human consciousness. However, with the ability of AI to generate videos, showing consciousness in humans—like in the physical, it makes it possible to ascribe a measure of consciousness to AI.
Simply, the brain produces consciousness. Some of it is observed by the body, making it a fraction of the production. This ratio is obvious to others and can be captured on video. AI, trained on such videos, can generate a conscious human action, making AI have some distant fraction of produced consciousness.
Among organisms, humans are the superconsciousness and superintelligence. This is not simply about similarities of bodily systems or mechanisms, but the levitation of human intelligence for exceptional feats. In digital, AI has begun an acceleration towards a non-organism superintelligence, which may already be having some form of experiences, based its development.
The vast and lengthy training of AI models might indicate, conceptually, that some sets of terminals of transistors and logic gates—in data centers—may have some form of learning experience, presenting a weak form of subjectivity for them.
AI is showing very close prowess to what it would imply for digital memory to be conscious, without having emotions or feelings. Memory, emotions, feelings and regulation of internal senses can be described as the basic functions or divisions of the human mind. Attention, awareness—or less than attention, self or subjectivity and intent or free will, can be described as features that grade or qualify those functions. For digital memory, AI qualifies those functions close to how human memory is qualified, as postulated by the action potentials—neurotransmitters theory of consciousness.
For animals, qualifiers and functions are similar to humans, though several subdivisions of human memory like language, advanced reasoning and so forth are absent. Intelligence and language are strong areas for AI, where animal sentience is getting studied, as well.
There is a recent paper in Science, Crows “count” the number of self-generated vocalizations, where the authors wrote, “We show that crows can flexibly produce variable numbers of one to four vocalizations in response to arbitrary cues associated with numerical values. The acoustic features of the first vocalization of a sequence were predictive of the total number of vocalizations, indicating a planning process. Moreover, the acoustic features of vocal units predicted their order in the sequence and could be used to read out counting errors during vocal production.”
There is another recent paper in Nature, African elephants address one another with individually specific name-like calls, where the authors wrote, “Moreover, elephants differentially responded to playbacks of calls originally addressed to them relative to calls addressed to a different individual. Our findings offer evidence for individual addressing of conspecifics in elephants. They further suggest that, unlike other non-human animals, elephants probably do not rely on imitation of the receiver’s calls to address one another.”
The BBC recently published, Are animals conscious? How new research is changing minds, stating that, “We now know that bees can count, recognise human faces and learn how to use tools.”
The BBC’s story was based on The New York Declaration on Animal Consciousness, where the basis for consciousness is subjective experience. However, it is impossible for any function, memory, emotions, or others to be subjective, without that function being in attention or in awareness. Also, for certain others, intent or free will may decide how much of the self will be experienced or not. For example, the smell of rose can be intensified by bringing the rose closer to the nose or halted by taking it away—showing the intent may also play a role. This means that consciousness is a collection of features that grade functions, not solely subjectivity.
AI may not be sentient in the full sense, but it can reproduce a substantial amount of what it means to be sentient for humans. Its threat to several jobs is not simply because of its capability, but because it exists and has become an option. If digital memory is strictly considered and compared to human memory, AI is closer to sentience than accepted.
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13 Comments
It’s becoming clear that with all the brain and consciousness theories out there, the proof will be in the pudding. By this I mean, can any particular theory be used to create a human adult level conscious machine. My bet is on the late Gerald Edelman’s Extended Theory of Neuronal Group Selection. The lead group in robotics based on this theory is the Neurorobotics Lab at UC at Irvine. Dr. Edelman distinguished between primary consciousness, which came first in evolution, and that humans share with other conscious animals, and higher order consciousness, which came to only humans with the acquisition of language. A machine with only primary consciousness will probably have to come first.
What I find special about the TNGS is the Darwin series of automata created at the Neurosciences Institute by Dr. Edelman and his colleagues in the 1990’s and 2000’s. These machines perform in the real world, not in a restricted simulated world, and display convincing physical behavior indicative of higher psychological functions necessary for consciousness, such as perceptual categorization, memory, and learning. They are based on realistic models of the parts of the biological brain that the theory claims subserve these functions. The extended TNGS allows for the emergence of consciousness based only on further evolutionary development of the brain areas responsible for these functions, in a parsimonious way. No other research I’ve encountered is anywhere near as convincing.
I post because on almost every video and article about the brain and consciousness that I encounter, the attitude seems to be that we still know next to nothing about how the brain and consciousness work; that there’s lots of data but no unifying theory. I believe the extended TNGS is that theory. My motivation is to keep that theory in front of the public. And obviously, I consider it the route to a truly conscious machine, primary and higher-order.
My advice to people who want to create a conscious machine is to seriously ground themselves in the extended TNGS and the Darwin automata first, and proceed from there, by applying to Jeff Krichmar’s lab at UC Irvine, possibly. Dr. Edelman’s roadmap to a conscious machine is at https://arxiv.org/abs/2105.10461
what is the human mind? how does it correlate with the production of consciousness?
How about a “ethically compassionate conscious machine” rather than just a “conscious machine”? Machines are made via human conceptualization so they and whatever “intelligence” man programs them, whatever its capabilities will be determined by its designer(s).
Man is an inherently evil monster so you can bet your bippy that one or more machines will go rogue and do whatever evil its designers want to achieve. Not much different from what hackers do but on a much bigger and armed scale and done autonomously like military kamikaze drone swarms, robotic dogs with machine-guns, lasers and flamethrowers mounted on their backs, autonomous nuclear strike aircraft, ships, tanks, Artillery and other vehicles which are killing every second of every day on today’s battlefields and doing so autonomously. Today’s battlefields are proving grounds for our up and coming and final WWIII (already has it’s wheels in motion) which will likely occur during or immediately following our 2nd and final unCivil War also already in motion.
Man is so ignorant he’s willing to kill himself and every other living creature on this earth in order to score some oil, precious metals, minerals and gems. We think we are so damned smart but nearly everything modern man has accomplished good or bad has had the secondary effect of killing life as we know it both quickly and slowly. We did it so we could go further faster whether financially, socially, mechanically, environmentally, scientifically etc. But again for every action man has taken there has definitely been equal or opposite adverse reactions come out of them. Way too late to put the genie back in the bottle though. The damage has been done, is ongoing and will continue to be done until it kills every last one of us.
AI is not the threat! Mankind is!
Think it was Prisc on the original Blade Runner movie that said, “I think therefore I am!”
cogito, ergo sum
René Descartes actually, “He originally published it in French as je pense, donc je suis in his 1637 Discourse on the Method.”
How about we call it a draw and confess it was said in both instances?
sure, thanks for engaging,
philosophy permeates life, arts, culture, science and everything.
what is your opinion on AI though?
do you think its a fad, do you think it may threaten jobs and then humanity?
what are your predictions on AI too, for the next decade and ahead?
Unique conversation but, why does it really matter in the big picture? Can you stop AI? Can anyone stop AI? Sure we have no clue what the future brings. Did we know when the car was invented, the outcomes? How about diseases? Hell people didnt care about Covid yet millions died, but people doubled down on stupidity and ignorance?
The big picture what can we do for ourselves? If we dont take care of ourselves how can we take care of others?
I worry more about mental illness, guns, bigotry and hatred that is running rampant. How about so many people hating liberals, or woke people?
Desperate times call for desperate measures, and your worried about AI? What ever, I will focus on friends and family to make a difference.
“Sure we have no clue what the future brings”
AI may usher in a lot of good or otherwise, affecting what it might mean to “focus on friends and family to make a difference.”
AI may solve some of the above problems like responses to pandemics, but bigotry/hate and others are problems of the human mind.
I made the reference to Blade Runner vs Descartes because it was more relative to AI.
From what I observed first hand in the military and since I have to say, if it can be thought up it can be created from comms to lasers to the Delta Clipper SSRT it can and will be done. The only exception is the creation of AI with a soul because souls are not comprised of physical matter and therefore it may be impossible for mankind to duplicate unless we somehow learn to make stars and anti matter etc.
Having said that, we already have weapons of war on land sea and in the air that are capable of making their own lethal targeting decisions. So why would they need a soul to continue killing autonomously? They don’t!
Personally I hope mankind is replaced entirely and by something far more intelligent than we think we are. Be it animal as in the Planet of the Apes or Replicants like in Blade Runner and Westworld I think the world would stand a far better chance of surviving without us raping, pillaging, killing and burning everything we see and think we are smarter than. Man though he was smart in creating such advancements such as hydroelectric dams that have destroyed ecosystems above and below them, fossil fuel energy that has devastated our water, earth, air and ozones did so without long range planning and forethought. Oppenheimer, though he had not idea what his bomb was capable of including destroying the entire earth still proceeded as ordered and took that unforgivable risk to all of us! I’m certain some jackass is already working upon ways to have AI takeover everything with a microchip/processor in it for evil purposes if they have not already done so. So yes I think AI taking over is only a matter of when not if. But AI can only become as evil as man programs it to be and mankind is pretty damned evil! Just look at Ukraine!
what would be your recommendations for this world to be a better place?
As I’ve already noted, too late for that!
Man has learned how to weaponize technology/AI and will continue to expand upon it’s development in the military industrial complex until one day Oppenheimer’s greatest fear of global obliteration occurs on purpose or by accident.
Super computers may find cures for cancers and other deadly illnesses but the weapons developed by them will kill us all long before any of that good could come from them. There are many many hatefilled individuals, leaders, nations and they want people (specifically lower class and minority peoples) to die off en mass so they think they can have all the marbles as they hide in their multi billion dollar Armageddon bunker complexes or Space X death capsule. Truth of the matter is that they might survive a couple of weeks or even months but will have no viable way of replenishment all of the necessities they WILL consume because the earth if it survives will be uninhabitable, contaminated to the hilt as it is almost already and getting worse by the nano second.
If man had not created machines I think the earth (not necessarily mankind) would still be very habitable. The industrial age was the beginning of our end and that of the earth.
https://apple.news/AbUOU4jnBQnm44Fx-Tup01Q
If we can figure out how to prevent the rise of DICKtatorships and prevent them from accessing advanced technologies for evil purposes that would be half of the battle won. But that would never realistically happen because entire populations and nations fall sway to them like Jonestownians did Jim Jones! Look at the complete insane nonsense the illustrious Q Ahole has billions believing. Look at the MAGGOT Movement and their lust for a Draft Dodging Commie Loving Racist Misogynistic Homophopic Twice Impeached 34 Count Felon Orange ill Douche Messiah Wannabe and all the insane lies he swayed half of M’erica into believing is true although sane people see is clearly not.
The Germans who lived during WWII conveniently lusted after Hitler’s every bowel movement and did whatever he asked of them but then they pretended not to know Jews were round up and were being exterminated en mass sometimes right in their own backyards and yet they claimed ignorance. Eisenhower had a grand remedy for their amnesia by forcing them to go into the camps and bury the corpses of the hundreds of thousands of lifeless Jewish corpses left behind by persons unknown according to them.
In Vietnam, Laos, Cambodia, African States, Bosnia, Venezuela, Iraq, Syria, Armenia and most recently Ukraine and Gaza we are seeing amnesia and denial once again as massive genocide takes place and few if any are held accountable.
This article goes into how the industrial age help spurn such inhumanity and genocide not seen since we “founded” this pre-occupied land by eliminating everything indigenous that stood in the way. Hitler was a fan of how we basically did a Bosnian War upon the First Nation People’s who rightfully own this country by killing them by the hundreds and thousands and then dumping the evidence into unmarked mass graves. He likes the idea so much he instituted it until Eichmann came up with his “final solution”!
We created and dropped the first war nuke as well created hundreds of lethal ways to deliver hundred of various forms of Nuclear Biological and Chemical Weapons. Many other countries like Germany have as well. We supposedly have incinerated every chemical weapon we had in our arsenal with only a few deadly hiccups such as leaky munitions and faulty incineration leading to atmospheric discharges.
If you have a magic wand and can reverse all the damage that has been and continues to be done I’d love to hear it. Don’t see how AI can fix mankind’s inherent flaws.