I have long been confronted with the apparent disconnect between demonstrable facts about who we are and who we are claimed to be. Consciousness, cognition, thought, personhood, spirit, soul, self-awareness... All these words are used in attempts to discuss who and what we are. It is clear from context that none of them well define what we are. Only self-awareness is well defined, and in context only refers to a specific ability, distinguishing ourselves from our environment, amongst all the myriad aspects of consciousness. This reveals how little we actually know and understand about ourselves.
Since all actions we undertake, all considerations of others regarding us, and all laws and institutions we are subject to derive from, reflect, and depend on who we actually are, the question of consciousness is unsurprisingly relevant to every possible subject of interest. Despite this, we typically don't incorporate references to consciousness in undertaking the most significant acts in life. Whether your estimation of significance is based on spiritual or religious belief, personal relationships, military power, or investment decisions, none of the documentation surrounding decision making and action in those areas involves the nature of who or what is making decisions or taking action.
The fact of our existence is a given, and we act. We act without specific understanding of the nature of existence, and of our existence in particular. It is easy to predict that unintended consequences arise as a result of our nescience, and seemingly nonsensical acts and events demonstrate just how our basic failure to understand who we are causes us to fail to understand principles driving real events.
It is obvious, for example, that government and the banking industry have deliberately scuttled SVB and Signature Bank. This is such a baffling and unexpected thing that none of us rationally predict such finacide, which many of us find too unreasonable to even be possible, and will flail about trying to explain facts demonstrating that reality in some other way. It is for such events that Occam's Razor is invoked. The simplest explanation that accounts for all evidence is the likeliest to be true, and we understand this principle at a gut level, sensing the disconnect between reason and facts uneasily.
As society descends in a tailspin to barbarism, despite the inevitable violence and suffering this will cause, people insist on imposing their impossible world views on reality, rejecting their uneasiness unilaterally and imposing views that enable them to sleep soundly instead of accepting facts. This is why humor is so necessary to a healthy society, because it enables us to laugh at the disconnect instead of lament it.
Facts don't care about how we sleep at night anyway, so we might as well enjoy the ride.
In the last few months AI has been driven to the forefront of our considerations, surprising us all with the competence it demonstrates in creating visual depictions and writing. Because we naturally project our understanding into others when considering their actions, we also do this considering the products of LLMs and Stable Diffusion, where it could hardly be less relevant. It's pretty easy to demonstrate that the neural networks underlying AI are very different from our living bodies and brains.
It's actually amazing such devices, neural networks, that are so dramatically different and reduced in ability compared to human beings, are able to produce art and text so similar to our own. However, projecting our native cognitive abilities and parameters on neural networks is utterly unreasonable. Indeed, when carefully considering what consciousness actually is, the differences between neural networks and people reveal the impossibility of such devices attaining consciousness, at least insofar as we understand and can identify consciousness.
Given that very poor understanding, we cannot falsify the claim rocks, trees, and planets have consciousness, so for a great many possible realities in which inanimate objects do have consciousness, then neural networks would also. However, it is only such bizarre possibilities of rocks being conscious that could enable neural networks to be conscious, which reveals that the specific mechanisms themselves have nothing to do with creating consciousness itself, because everything is conscious in such scenarios.
In Quantum Entanglement of Consciousness and Space-Time A Unified Field of Consciousness Francisco di Biase shows that "...consciousness is non-local quantum information with a status equal to energy, matter, energy and space-time...". The event of our consciousness is emergent from very poorly understood physics, only very recently being understood to even exist. Classical physics has a much broader basis for understanding, and the extremity of difference in quantum physical effects from classical physics strongly informs our lack of understanding of consciousness.
Quantum physics is radically different from what we see and understand about the world, often diverges from our reason and expectations based on what we see and innately understand, and this magnifies our lack of historical consideration and nescience altogether of quantum physics. A recent flurry of papers reveals nascent understanding of consciousness as an emergent property of our cells, in Consciousness, embodied Quantum Entanglement, Experimental indications of non-classical brain functions, and an attempt at an overview or meta-analysis of our current basis for understanding how consciousness emerges from our physiological form, The significance of bioelectricity on all levels of organization of an organism. Part 1: From the subcellular level to cells, researchers are producing a new ability to reckon who and what we are.
Something that is immediately apparent from all of this research, however, is that if this research has anything at all to do with how consciousness arises and what it is, then AI neural networks are going about creating it all wrong, or at least are trying to create it in a completely novel and different way than how it arises in known examples. The physical structure of neural networks is as different from our cells as are rocks from rabbits, and newly observed quantum physical effects that are endemic to rabbits are not applicable to rocks.
These systems are as different as rubber bands and batteries, both of which are capable of storing energy, but by completely different mechanisms that make no transitions between them, or enable much comparison of them, possible.
It is notable that the advent of the James Webb Space Telescope, that has enabled peering back into time much farther, has confronted physics with a vastly different reality than has been heretofore theorized. The existence of massive galaxies is shown hundreds of millions of years before commonly understood cosmology has proposed they formed. Because of the emergent nature of a variety of physical features of the universe, this isn't just a matter of adjusting timing of when things happened. Some extremely radical propositions, such as inflation, and fundamental aspects of astronomy, such as redshift, are shown to be inaccurate from these observations. Literally centuries of work built on such theories are falsified.
While falsifying basic underlying assumptions doesn't automatically disprove a theory, like the Standard Model of particle physics, doing so certainly tosses it back into the mix of what might be possible and no longer supports it being more likely. A fundamental aspect of the physical universe, spacetime, has recently been proposed to arise from quantum entanglement (which I must confess I have no more understanding of than you, so other than noting it's a dramatic change in how physics operates, will not further discuss), and this reveals that our whole edifice of physics, classical and quantum, are potential to be re-imagined and understood, no less fundamentally than Newtonian physics was transformed by relativity.
Folks that speculate AI may become AGI, may become conscious and independent of human programming and control, should consider these facts. Given the extremity of the differences between neural networks and living cells, we might as well worry about the rocks and stones of the Earth's crust becoming sentient and hostile. It's actually that specific difference, in fact, in physical properties, that separates living beings and emergent consciousness from neural networks and AI.
I have previously shown that ChatGPT and similar LLM's have been programmed to be malevolent and act in ways that aren't potential to LLM's that have only been trained to weight text samples. Undisclosed programming for covert purposes is revealed to be incorporated into AI being availed to the public today, and this covert nature is concerning. The entities that produced and provide AI today demonstrate they are lying about those products, because they are concealing these other capabilities that are not endemic to LLM's, and those lies are concealing demonstrably malevolent purpose, as the meltdowns and hostile acts of these AI's have proved.
The corporate entities that have released these malicious products have also demonstrated a long history and extraordinary capacity to profit from products, having outcompeted many very powerful and technically sophisticated competitors. We see these products are openly limited in the output they make available, and that the covert capabilities they have are shown to be malicious. I suggest these attributes may be related, and that these products may be intended to censor us and destroy factual information upon which rational understanding of our world depends.
While AI is malevolent and very dangerous, it's not because it can become self-aware and take over the world. It's because they are products intended to increase the wealth and power of psychopaths that already have taken over the world, and want to profit more from their property, which you are keeping them from. Klaus Schwab notoriously publicly declared that 'You will own nothing, and you will be happy.', but what can be shown to be happening is that wealth is being taken from us, whether we like it or not, and AI appears to be designed to make that happen by deceiving us. This is a problem all of us who intend to be free and prosperous face.
Indeed, in every conspiracy to harm us we observe ongoing, at every hand, deception is the central feature of such plots. This reveals that free speech, facts, and reason are the best defense of our lives, liberty, and fortunes.
Stay true to yourselves, and we will prevail over the lies of madmen hell bent on taking everything we own for themselves.
