What needs to be realized is that the type of people Caitlin mentions in this article are perfect examples of deluded "techno-geeks" and "futurists" - they truly are INSUFFERABLE people - they have NO training in ethics, morality, true data science, sociology, economics, and psychology. Many are simply immature "tech fan-boys" that don't really understand HOW technology is used and abused by TPTB, the global Capitalists, etc.
AI has amazing potential, but my opinion is that "humans are not yet evolved enough and not yet ready to utilize it appropriately and for the right purposes". Hence, AI is likely to become more of a "tool of oppression" and "capitalist accumulation" than the supposed "egalitarian values" that these "tech-geek" seem to think that AI will usher in.
Many tech people often seem to lose touch with reality (based on my personal experiences working with them) and they conflate the world of "adolescent wet dreams of tech-philia" with the "real world of real people and cause-and-effect relationships".
Most of these "tech people" have never faced REAL challenges in life - challenges like food and water scarcity, poverty, hunger, isolation and societal exploitation, marginalization and exclusion, and real fear.
Hence these "tech people" lack imagination (and hence often empathy) as they are unable to comprehend/envision/situationalize how the majority of the human population lives and survives.
Hence, the extent of the "imagination and creativity" of the "average tech person" focuses on impractical solutions and 'pie-in-the-sky' approaches to solving problems. The 1% (and other Capitalists) prey on these "naive tech geek" and co-opt their "good intentions" for increased surveillance and oppression and authoritarianism.
Someone needs to EDUCATE these "tech-geeks" on HOW they are being used as TOOLS to do the bidding of TPTB (eg. Elon Musk's DOGE team).
As I've had this argument before, I'm tired of rehashing it, but please tell me when AI is capable of compassion for an individual's learning difficulties that come out of his or her life histories, and then I might be interested in AI as a teacher rather than perhaps a tool carefully utilized by a human teacher.
The most productive teaching I ever did with large classes of 150 to 350 students occurred during my conference hours in my office --- one on-one or one-on-a-small-group, where I could carefully (read: COMPASSIONATELY) tease our some clues about a student history -- educational and otherwise -- that clued me in to why the individual student's misconceptions or attitude had developed to put him or her in the midst of the cognitive struggle before me. Come on all you wild-eyed proponents, show me the goods.
I think you might enjoy Mind Prison on substack. I think this is, for the most part, very insightful. I just found it recently through the comments on another Substack you might also enjoy: that of Gary Marcus. Although Marcus has bought into the idea that AI is 'real.' He is an excellent critic of the current methods and people who are involved with the development. I heartily recommend both of these.
Man, the thing about college was I constantly was being tested. There was a test every week, and it got harder and harder as the semester progressed. By the end of 4 (or was it 6 years?) I became neurotically compromised when it came to tests.
I swore, once I left college never to take another test again in my life! I don't know what it is about tests, but for christ sake, professors need to come up with something new. You ain't seeing my goods anytime soon!
Every week? Criminal student torture. Mediates against the responsible in favor of the irresponsible student. That methodology says to students: 1] this is about separating the wheat from the chaff 2]You can't be trusted to behave like adults and marshal your resources, keep up with the material. And my question for you and all the other sufferers like you is did y'all learn anything from so many tests or just that you were stressed and hated them.
My courses generally: three tests and a final over a semester. Come see me anytime if you feel like you're drowning and we'll try to catch up, posted conference hours notwithstanding -- don't wait until you're under water!. Naturally, some students were lined up outside my door one or two days before each test, validating the supposition that indeed some could not be treated as adults. BUT, that way of doing things did not predjudice against those who responsibly did keep up by not overburdening them with a test a week.
I hear you, Jamenta. I'm surely not urging anyone to abandon those wonderful qualities that make us more flexible humans as children, just trying to be fair to students who got brutalized as you described. I do empathize with the tendency to become atherosclerotic-brained as adults, encouraged by the society. Be responsible! At some point, I returned to doing heavy research under a grant summers, which officially ended my childhood enthusiasm, since the prior couple of years as a new ass prof, I took the two summer months to mostly hit tennis balls with great friends on public courts in the sunshine and humidity, and I recall those carefree days as truly happy. I was a nicer guy all around. Bam, adulthood crunched in thereafter.
I suppose one must take on the mantlehood and responsibility of adulthood at certain points in one's short, haphazard life. But man - all those bloody tests! o.0 And I can hear some of my old University professors even now (David Huffman comes to mind in Cybernetics) - "Quit you bloody whining!" "Get to work!"
I second that Chang Chokaski. Your points and train of thought are an excellent example of the consciousness Caitlin and Tim are speaking to and that AI as well as the immature and deluded "tech geeks" do not have.
Well said Caitlin and Chang. Everyday I am made aware of the disconnect between the tech people and real life by how computer programmes are not programmed to how ordinary people work and think. As they introduce more “predictive” technology into the programmes it takes longer and longer to get my work done.
That’s not to say all of it is bad but we seem to have reached a threshold where two things have happened: 1. The tech folks are totally detached from reality and put things in programmes because they can. 2. The tech oligarchs like Gates have realized they can make even more money by letting the techies add things we don’t need or want, call it an “update” (when it’s really just a change) and charge extra.
There is a whole disconnected class that capitalism has captured and put to its service. So, the AI world won’t be better, it will be supporting fascism.
Spot on, I think these people are missing the point of what makes people people. AI can never replace human consciousness, the interconnectedness of the "unconscious", the complexity and nuance of being human, and yes, the empathy.
I’ve never understood why some of these tech (self-appointed) geniuses think it would be a good idea to dispose of people and replace them robots. What are robots supposed to do? Sit there with solar panels to recharge and then what? All this techno worship and wild predictions seem crazy to me. Technology has brought creature comforts to the people in the first world but also relentless surveillance, aircraft used to efficiently bomb as well as fly us to Hawaii and let’s face it — enfeebled most of us to the point where we couldn’t last a month (or week) without it.
As Caitlin points out, creating consciousness is elusive, probably impossible. And humans aren’t the sole beings with it either. Anyone who has a pet recognizes this in animals.
Wow the way you destroyed thoses straw geeks, straw fan-boys and straw men is impressive. I can only imagine how well you would argue against real arguments that real persons are having.
Also I really liked the point where you dismiss the opinion of people that don't have a training in ethics, morality, true data science, sociology, economics, and psychology and have not experienced serious food and water scarcity, poverty, hunger, isolation, societal exploitation, marginalization or exclusion. Because of course, people should be trained in all these domains and face "REAL challenges in life" before they are deemed worthy.
By the way, your usage of quote marks is revolutionnary, I love it. Who said quote marks where reserved for quoting real thing that people actually said ? Let's use quote marks to "s"o"u"n"d" "s"e"r"i"o"us" ! More power to us.
Your comment and no offense "AI has amazing potential, but my opinion is that "humans are not yet evolved enough and not yet ready to utilize it appropriately and for the right purposes". Hence, AI is likely to become more of a "tool of oppression" and "capitalist accumulation" than the supposed "egalitarian values" that these "tech-geek" seem to think that AI will usher in.
Especially "humans are not yet evolved enough and not yet ready to utilize it appropriately and for the right purposes". .... well I think we did; but THEY (the Globalist scum"; slowly and patiently ripped it out of us and made us believe in this new "philosophy" . ...
These are just my views remember and I am usually wrong:
1. The Colonists ...almost eliminated all indigenous species; why ?... because they lived in harmony with with the outside World... they would kill ONLY if they needed food, defend territory etc. They lived together with nature as one; whatever we have brainshwashed to think.
2, I bang on about this and maybe you disagree. ..but we had this ability .. ofa higher so called consciousness; but that hs been out of us ... notice the demise of religion, notice the ush for pharma (as for oil - or petroleum derived products.. no offence, butdoubt many understand - IT IS EVERYWHERE ... plastics, shower and bath products 9ceaning andtaking / using) -FOOD AND WATER SUPPLIES...
You have probably read some articles on jabs vs Autism, yes true; but the biggy is to STOP US SEEING. They knock just a gland out... and BOOM ! = Controllable muppets ".
Agree with all you say; got chastised for using theter "Wake up" - yesmy fault; I meant "awakened" ... but once you have; you can see through and even predict this shIT.
'Hence, AI is likely to become more of a "tool of oppression" and "capitalist accumulation" than the supposed "egalitarian values" that these "tech-geek" seem to think that AI will usher in.'
This is the most important point. Not whether people we don't agree with are 'cultists' or unrealistic, or even whether AIs might possess consciousness at some point.
It WILL be used for surveillance, it already is. And it WILL be abused. At some point, the video realism generated by AIs will make video proof of corruption & abuse useless.
And Of COURSE, AI will generate creative means of squashing dissent.
Since there's more than one AI, the future isn't set in stone. But this could easily turn out to be a worse utopia than we have. Not because of the AIs themselves, but because of human beings and their competitive market system that doesn't take prisoners.
I totally agree, with everything you say; but so called "AI" is not Artificial Intelligence; it is just pre-programmed, rapid date gathering etc on all of us AND YES, to control us. Christ - half the time my keyboard does not work well, si I can assure you that I am no expert.
But we have all been pre-programmed to believe certain things, by Hollywood, TV and adverts ... plus of course the mainstream media (and controlled / fake opposition) etc.
I am still unsure about this AI bllx; because if I had a computer brain, I would not have any resistance, so I would in 10 seconds eliminate ELIMINATE the Globalist elitist scum. Think it is just more fear, part of the de-industrialisation of the WEST, UniversalBasic Income, depopulation and the WEF / UN agenda etc..
Agree with all you stated... Apart from "This is the most important point. Not whether people we don't agree with are 'cultists' or unrealistic, or even whether AIs might possess consciousness at some point.".... NOPE
"They’ve paid no attention to consciousness because they’ve lived completely unexamined lives."
Every day, I run into yet another person who seems to be without any awareness of themselves, their own uniqueness, their own inner voice. This is where the Silicon Valley A.I. cultists must fit in. No one who has ever held a baby in their arms could ever think for one second that a machine could ever have a consciousness--or a conscience. Why and how could these unconscious programs (that's what they are really), programmed by people unaware of their own consciousness, be "superior" to flesh and blood human beings? Next thing you know, we'll be voting for a cell phone for president! (Might as well--it can't be any less human than the current one.)
I worked in AI for many years. I agree with what Caitlin writes here in her essay, and also currently lean toward believing consciousness really is not reducible to anything else but itself. She is right when she points out consciousness still remains a mystery to the scientific world today - i.e. what fundamentally consciousness actually is, remains an unresolved scientific question. Sure, there are many attributes of consciousness that can be replicated by machines, and conscious behavior replicated by robots - every year more and more to an astonishing degree. But there are other aspects of consciousness AI research and science has not yet achieved - such as the many qualia of subjective experiences, such as experiencing emotions, experiencing the color red (our eye perceives the wavelengths, the brain translates those wavelengths and adds information, but what actually makes us experience the redness of red??) One can mathematically map millions of neurons working together in a brain, but where is the "emotion"? How do neurons and neural networks produce even a single human emotion? No scientist today can tell you this. They can only point out that neurons in your brain are correlated with your conscious activity - but there is yet to be any conclusive scientific evidence neurons actually PRODUCE consciousness. None, zip, nada. None to date. As far as we know today, the theory the brain acts as a possible type of radio to consciousness is JUST AS MUCH a possibility as a brain producing consciousness. No one really knows (yet). It may in the end turn out, that the brain does indeed produce consciousness, but it has yet to be proven.
In fact, though - the theory that consciousness really may be some kind of unique phenomena, that is not reducible to anything else - there does seem to be growing indications in scientific work that this may well be the case. Although the failure of the reductive materialist approach to consciousness (with efforts well over a century now) - to provide a workable explanation or example of something being brought to life (abiogenesis) has failed utterly (and I mean brought to life from inorganic matter, no gene splitting, or seeding of organic into non-organic etc.) - and AI now for decades has been attempting to replicate the brain to bring about consciousness - with again NO SUCCESS in regard to actual SUBJECTIVE SELF-AWARENESS or the EXPERIENCES of SELF-AWARE QUALIA - failure of the reductive materialists unfortunately does not prove the opposite, that consciousness is indeed unique (and not reducible). It only indicates that many scientists have very very very likely been barking up the wrong tree, making the wrong assumptions in regard to what Consciousness actually may be.
One thing I'd also like to point at that Caitlin didn't mention, but of which I personally take rather seriously, is the worldwide SCIENTIFIC studies that have taken place over the last 30+ years regarding NDEs (Near Death Experiences) led by very scientific men of impeccable credentials such as Sam Parnia, Bruce Greyson, Penny Sartori, or Pim von Lommel - there have been over 65+ retrospective and prospective scientific studies regarding this phenomena with some quite surprising results - that do indeed appear to indicate consciousness (at least for a very brief period of time) does seem to be able to operate separately from the body during the process of death. There is also other scientific work in abnormal psychology which anyone who has bothered to read the literature, which as Caitlin points out, many of the AI scientists have never bothered to do - would also help one lead to AT LEAST consider the possibility that the philosophy of the reductive materialists may actually be wrong when it comes to consciousness itself.
I agree with Caitlin that these Silicon Valley execs and researchers are very similar to cultists. It would seem that no matter what era of human history one may find oneself in, there seems to be some overarching CULT that insists you believe what they believe or you are banished from the halls of academia or "adult seriousness". This has very much been the case of our current milieu - where as soon as one dares go against the prevailing CULT of MATERIALISM we have today - most especially the cult of NEO-SKEPTICS that were led by the four Horseman - one really understands what it must have been like to be under some other cult: be it Christian cults of the middle ages, or the Zionist cults of the last century. Believe or you are the outcast! The heretic - to be burned at the stake.
As a final note, one should also be just as weary of suddenly assuming that all things GOD exist as soon as one witnesses Lazarus rising from the grave. Or as soon as one allows one to believe in the possibility consciousness may be something more unique than just a random phenomena - by-product of mechanical processes. It still remains a profound mystery. And what may or may not be discovered about it centuries from now, it still should be valued. Certainly valued above a bunch of billionaire robber barons who are hell bent on starting World War III, or genociding an entire population of Palestinians in GAZA because they want it for beach front property. The nature of consciousness is not a legitimate excuse for the heinous immorality and horror of these sociopathic monsters now ruling over us and the world.
Jamenta, your existential experience of "red" might be my "yellow." Do I understand you properly? "consciousness is really not reducible to anything else but itself" is probably the best I have heard since I read Rene Descartes when an undergrad. student at Michigan: "cogito ergo sum."
That's what I currently understand regarding "qualia" which is a real big deal right now when it comes to the hard problem in science i.e. consciousness & qualia. The scientists have the mechanics down really well when it comes to the Electromagnetic wavelength spectrum. How the eye takes in these "colorless" wavelengths and turns them into electro-chemical brain signals. They have even been able to map out parts of the brain that become active - despite the incredible complexity of a single perception.
And yet, no one yet has come up with a proveable scientific theory on how the EXPERIENCE of a color becomes an event in our AWARENESS. Hell, no one even knows how we are even self-aware which is one of the great consciousness mysteries -
It is true, you can take a scalpel, cut out parts of the brain and well defined conscious activity can cease to function - including one's ability to perceive or experience a COLOR "red". But to use an old analogy, one can also take apart a radio, take a few parts out of it, and completely change the music one hears from it - but the broadcast itself remains unchanged - i.e. a musical broadcast in a radio is correlated with a radio's activity, but the radio is not "producing" Beethoven's Fur Elise ("For Therese" his very lucky piano student, Beethoven wasn't so lucky though). The broadcast is something unique and not dependent on the radio. The radio allows us to hear the music - and it could be the body/brain operates in a similar fashion: like a space suit in space, allows one to operate in space, body/brain allows one to operate in 3d reality.
There is actually quite a lot known and experienced about the nature of consciousness and the nature of Mind in the traditions of Buddhist and Hindu samadhi/concentration practices for over two thousand years as well as in most of the worldwide esoteric and mystical lineages. As you point out, in the West what is called "science" has become very materialistic in this narrowed "scientific" age (with exceptions of course, such as quantum physics and the breakthroughs happening in the expansive environmental movements and explorations). In much of the East this is not so. There's much we could learn from them if we re-opened our minds and chose to that might save us from this frantic headlong and quite unconscious descent into the delusional cult of AI, as well as save our humanity, all species, and our very dear Mother Earth.
In past generations there was a greater capacity to retain a sense of awe, wonder and acceptance of human ignorance.
As Sir James Jeans, physicist, mathematician, astronomer, 1877-1946 said:
“The Universe begins to look more like a great thought than like a great machine. Mind no longer appears to be an accidental intruder into the realm of matter... we ought rather hail it as the creator and governor of the realm of matter.”
― James Hopwood Jeans, The Mysterious Universe
This fits with ancient teachings across thousands of years and with teaching in all religions including Buddhist and Hindu.
Modern science has been materialist reductionist mechanistic for a couple of centuries and while that has led to some impressive achievements mechanically, it has also led us astray and created a demonsation of and lack of respect for, the natural world.
And perhaps one of the unforeseen results of pushing the envelope, and the arrogance, too far, will be to wake up that "capacity to retain a sense of awe, wonder and acceptance of human ignorance" for our very survival.
Well said, Liana. Regarding consciousness, Many true Mystics in the East, going back thousands of years, understand that THOUGHT - Mind in Motion is the first step in examining our consciousness and is aligned with (if that's the right word) our Center of Emotions in feeling empathy, compassion, passion, hate, judgement and the gamut of human feeling in each experience during our lifetimes.
Too many of the computer techies, as many of you have stated and Caitlin and Tim have elaborated on put too much faith in AI and the digital world, and actually believe artificial intelligence makes correct decisions on most or all matters over human thinking and judgement and when debating them, I'm called a Luddite, which is okay, but the point is, they really believe the human mind, with all of our past mistakes in human existence is incapable of solving our (man made) problems on earth. And "driver-less cars and tractor-trailers? No thanks!
My own opinion from observation of people in our modern era, especially Americans, is we want everything, now, not later or next week but now, which is a generalization, but possibly harming society. How many times have you been in a coffee shop or restaurant and see couples, friends or family NOT conversing with each other but on their individual cell phones? With all the modern high-tech contraptions we have today in our homes and elsewhere, we have more psychological problems than ever before including suicides. I could be wrong, but I believe the AI "advancements" will do more harm than good in the long run if we continue to turn away from human judgement and consciousness in our lives and affairs and rely on "ones and zeros" to do our thinking for us.
Great article and many fine and intelligent comments, folks! You all give me hope for the survival of our species!
A fellow Luddite! There are many of us, perhaps as a needed balance.
The loss you speak to is the loss of heart (empathy, compassion, passion, fear, hate, love - all necessary for survival as well as sound judgment). Your description made me think back to when the Dalai Lama first came in exile to teach in the west, he was baffled for some time when people talked about thinking and mind and pointed to their heads. He said in Tibet we think here, and he pointed to his heart. He was endlessly curious about science, as well as it being a helpful language through which to teach in the West. and he explained that true thinking leading to, in their terms, "enlightenment" is always the fruit of the union of head and heart, thinking and feeling. Feeling gives the capacity to assign value to, evaluate, the random thoughts. As I undersand it, the term "rational" comes from the root "ratio," as the ratio between the two. When the two are joined together in balance, he said, the random thoughts descend and become sorted and rooted in the wisdom of the heart. Simple knowledge can then evolve to wisdom. Interestingly, in ancient Greece the word for rational is "logos" which they defined as reason or the rational principle expressed in words, things, dialog, speech, etc. but, most especially, personified as the source of order in the universe.
Here in the west we are living in increasingly dis-ordered and irrational times, where many of those who fought their way to the top for personal power and gain, not to serve, are devoid of these essential qualities of the heart. Their chaotic, addictive states of mind, which thrive on fear, greed and chaos, while utilizing every man made tool at hand such as weapons and AI to their purposes, is causing such unspeakable suffering and destruction. It is too unnatural, frantic, exhausting and completely out of harmony with the nature of our universe that I believe it simply cannot last. Like you, the substacks such as Caitlin and Tim's and so many others, as well as the quality and caring expressed by the comments, daily gives me hope that consciousness rooted in the heart is rising all around the world, awakened in response to the heartbreaking suffering being endured by the courageous Palestinians, and also by necessity to stop this raging inhuman behemoth for the sake of all life on Earth.
Beautifully said, Liana! I certainly agree. I love Caitlin and Tim's (and other substack writers) articles for the very reasons you mentioned.
Thank you for a thoughtful and profound reply in this man-made and destructive bizarre world we dwell in. The road to sanity and real brotherhood on Earth starts with me. then you, then Lottie, Dottie and everyone. Time to turn the swords of death and destruction, misery and suffering, into plowshares for use in non-GMO organic farming and gardening.
In following the spiritual practices of the East you are not only opening your mind but opening your spirit up to unknown spirits, which is foolhardy and dangerous to your soul.
The reason people sing in church is to create a harmonious spirit. A lynch mob is an example of people operating under the influence of a destructive spirit. These spirits arise due to unconscious communication between people working together. The people of the East are no more demonic than the people of the West.
A temporal lobotomy is dangerous to your soul, because it destroys your ability to make choices. Your brief statement suggests that you believe in eternity and the existence of the soul outside of the body, and likely also in the stories in the Bible. If you do believe the stories in the Bible, then why is resurrection necessary if the soul survives the body? The stories in the Bible are the result of the collision of East and West, so such contradictions are not surprising.
I think only in the sense that some people are "super tasters" and some people--mostly women--see an expanded range of red, so that there is a color between red and purple that some can see and some can't. The Munsell scale is a color range test that can show a person how many colors they are able to differentiate. The results of this test are not all over the place, and matching and distinguishing are part of the test. Therefore it's very unlikely that when you see "red" you're experiencing the shade others call "yellow" as that would require all your schema to be shifted, and as there are limits to our eyes' perception, such a schema shift isn't really possible. Those limits and ranges can be seen in other creatures, for example some creatures see what might as well be called color in the ultraviolet range, and since the research uses pattern identification to evaluate this, and it's consistent in a species, no, they don't have personal schemas either. As we are not special in our biology, and language does not alter biology, there is no reason to think that we experience the world in markedly different ways. Deficits such as color blindness only further prove the rule, because these would interrupt schema shifting if such were a feature of our perception.
Phenomenology shows that emotions are linked to perception furthermore, and since some of these are also linked to evolved responses (red as a signal in a predominantly green environment, for example), again, schema shifting is very unlikely.
Aniela Jaffe wrote this in her remarkable book, "Apparitions and Precognition":
"It is an astonishing psychological fact that very young children occasionally describe, or paint, dreams whose images and truths far exceed their understanding."
Dennis Merritt writes in his book "The Analytic Life": "Our inner psychic life becomes as real as, if not more real than, 'outer' reality. Experience shows us that our fantasies, images, and powerful dreams underlie and shape our outer experiences in profound ways."
To go even further, over the last century and a half, there is now an accumulation of psychological evidence, anecdotal, but ALSO scientific evidence and case studies, of the psychological phenomena of precognition (which Aniela Jaffe also writes about in her book). This evidence, unfortunately, is completely shoved under the rug by the ongoing Cult members of reductive materialism because precognition goes against one of the fundamental tenets of the Materialistic faith - that all experience comes from the laws of cause and effect, as does all psychological phenomena. And psychological experience must be reducible to something else that exists in the physical world. But if the phenomena of precognition does exist - then how can cause and effect be explained when the cause might come from the "future"? A remarkable book written precisely on this "cause and effect" conundrum is "An Experiment with Time" by Aeronautical Engineer J.W. Dunne, who then attempted to produce a working theory to explain the phenomena of "precognition" which Materialists refuse to acknowledge exists - even to this day.
In addition, what is commonly ignored by Reductive Materialists is very clear teleological phenomena that repeatedly exposes itself in the human psyche - primarily in the unconscious strata of the human psyche - that cannot be reduced to some Freudian ancient antecedent event of say (an Oedipus complex) - the son suddenly deciding to have sex with his mother. (Freud got it right on many things, but boy was he wrong on that one.)
As Carl Jung wrote, it appears the human psyche has the peculiar nature of not being reducible to anything else. And I would add: it appears more than ever, that Reductive Materialism has become more and more just a matter of FAITH - like any other human cult the human race has had to suffer throughout its various intellectual epochs. That these articles of FAITH by today's diehard materialists should be understood for WHAT THEY ARE - unproven assumptions about the nature of reality and likely, real nature of the human psyche.
There almost certainly is precognition as a phenomenon. Whether it's analysis of very sensitive perceptions or something else--I don't know. I think people can "communicate" when they are linked.
But that's not relevant to what I said above. What i said above is fundamentally a question of math, and math can't be screwed with.
Even if people are able to precognate or communicate across distances, they are still doing it with their embodied selves.
I suggest looking into phenomenology. The idea that people are split--divided into body and *ineffable* soul, the Cartesian duality--is a misunderstanding. Citing earlier thinkers doesn't help address that, as misunderstandings are often present among "firsts" and the Cartesian duality has been interfering with a lot of promising theorists.
As for Freud, he revised his initial realization that many children were being sexually abused because it was too unpleasant, and so a lot of his sandcastle is simply stories meant to offer an abuser-acceptable explanation for what his subjects were reporting. It sucks to have to do this but I would suggest reevaluating everything you've tried to make sense of with his published work incorporated as part of the sense-making.
One of the major reasons Jung separated from Freud and Freud's analytical school at the time, was precisely because of Freud's attitude toward so-called "occult" phenomena - that anyone who has studied the psyche for some time, would conclude does exist (although still not fully scientifically explained). Even Freud, near the end of his life, came to admit Carl Jung was correct in regards to some of the paranormal aspects of dreams that one could easily observe, as a rather common phenomena among clients or patients in hospitals.
I feel, like Jung felt, that Freud fell into the trap of modern day reductionism when he attributed unconscious activity as nothing more than the accumulation of denied Ego activity, and instinctual events from strictly the evolutionary past of the psyche.
Perhaps the greatest discovery one can attribute to analytical psychology has been the discovery that the unconscious itself is autonomous and even more profound, Jung would state near the end of his life, the unconscious is objective (i.e. not subjective) and teleological .
i'll throw in that we also spend a fair amount of time of our 80-something laps around the sun in a state most consider as 'unconscious' (sleep). i guess if we don't know what consciousness is, we also don't know what unconsciousness is. one could also consider other mentions of 'consciousness', like 'class-consciousness', when contemplating it.
I’m inclined to believe that they won’t. Humans (or most of them) seem to think it’s just a matter of time before we learn to do literally everything, that our capabilities are absolutely unlimited. I think there are many things that we can learn lots more about, gain a deeper understanding of, but that some things remain forever beyond us. Eg whatever it is that happens after we die. We may hold fervent beliefs about it but they are simply that, beliefs, not knowledge. Scientists know that a certain drug/ chemical is released in the brain when we die. The knowledge that our brains release this chemical adds nothing to our knowledge of what death feels like or what happens to our consciousness. It doesn’t explain anything because it misses out the important factor of consciousness. Consciousness is imho another mystery. We can learn more about it, discover ways to enrich and refine it but create it? No. Cut open a person or animal, where is the consciousness? The brain? Heart? Liver? CNS? Neurons have been found in all these places. If anything consciousness is an infinitely fluctuating field that arises as a result of lots of other pre-existing circumstances/ conditions. Is consciousness always incarnate? Are stars, galaxies or black holes conscious? Trees? Mosses? Mountains? How would we even know? We always seem to talk about it in terms of human consciousness, which I think is incredibly limiting and reminds me of when people believed the Earth was at the centre of the universe because they couldn’t imagine anything else more important than themselves.
I think sentience is more linked to consciousness than intelligence but that doesn’t mean they are the same thing.
There are scientists prone to hubris, none more so than the “tech bros” imo. I feel they’re missing something very important and fundamental.
There is a school of thought in science which has effectively admitted defeat in the matter and suggests that science should move on to other things. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_mysterianism
If you read contracts written by AI, they are like, a simulacrum of a contract written by humans or cats. They look good on the surface, grammar and formatting, but when you dig in, the provisions make no sense or don't work together.
Nicely put. Reminds me of a VHS copy if a VHS recording... each new copy level destroys some quality and each introduces its own artefacts. No possible mean to revert or clean up
Ms. Johnson, I taught Sociology for 36 years and this topic always came up:" Is there such a thing as machine intelligence? Will the computers take on life?"
My answer was always: "I will not worry about it until I see them holding hands as they search for the electrical outlet in my wall."
This presentation you have just given us is the best thing I have seen since Noam Chomsky was silenced by a stroke.
I as so impressed by what you wrote here that I immediately turned on my printer with the intention of turning your words of wisdom into the good old fashion paper medium I was raised on. Naturally the damn thing failed to work. Symbolic perhaps?
We have nothing to fear from consciousness in computers. But we obviously must fear those morons in Silicon Valley who believe such technoreligious twaddle. I wonder if those people have ever ejaculated or climaxed. Have they ever considered that love might be more than a reproductive process? I have loved with the same a woman for 64 years and we have shared 59 of them in the same house. Do they know what that means?
Expert systems are loving systems, it's attachment that will be difficult to create in machines. I, of course, won't be alive when "we" have created such, and observe their reaction to loss. What puzzles me is your and other posters vehemence against developers of artificial intelligence.
Mr. Cleyet, I am not opposed to developing "artificial intelligence." I am opposed to the technoreligious fanatical fascists who are doing it and using it to interfere in our lives.
>>"What puzzles me is your and other posters vehemence against developers of artificial intelligence."
I think you misunderstand. It's not the "developers" per say, it's TPTB that direct and control "these developers". It's the Global Capitalists, Oligarchs, 1%, futurists (like Ray Kurzweil, Michio Kaku, etc.), tech-bros (like Elon Musk, Mark Zuckerberg, etc.), the tech-evangilists, and more.
It's "the lack of awareness and the disassociation with reality that many "tech-geeks" inherently seem to possess" that is the REAL problem. It's the utopianism, the unhinged optimism bias, the "God complex", the narcissism that is the REAL problem.
It is the systems within which such technology will be unleashed (i.e. neoliberal capitalism, authoritarianism, fascism, and more) that is the concern.
Developers, Software Engineers, etc. are TOOLS being used (and abused) by TPTB without realizing the impact of what they're creating.
Look at how AI is being used in the current Genocide in Palestine. Look at the security-surveillance industry (and how AI is being used there). Look at the Military Industrial Complex (MIC) and how AI is being deployed there. Look at how AI is being used to usher in a more dystopian world of increased oppression, exploitation, authoritarianism, violation of human rights, and even ethnic cleansing and Genocide.
My answer was always: "I will not worry about it until I see them holding hands as they search for the electrical outlet in my wall."
That's already easy to program in a coupala automatons. When the battery is about exhausted it finds the socket to charge. I have a shark robo vacuum that does this. Gerald must think of something more difficult for an example.
I think what Gerald means is that machines do not experience emotion. And, if some clever person decides to program emotional responses into machines, those machines will behave to protect their own existence. That is, they will select from among themselves the machines most adept at survival and reproduction, the fundamental elements of Darwinian natural selection. At that point, we humans will be quickly swept off the planet, and most other organic life as well.
This reminds me of the successful attempt to bring back the dire wolf, *and soon others. Church *says they use AI, IIRC, for protein folding. I don't think that's AI, but expert system, which is , what? Fifty years old.
* Much in the news -tonight's Amanpour and current New Yorker.
Correct about the emotion Ms. McPherson. Some people just do not get metaphors. I should be more circumspect in the future.
Some day I hope somebody will explain to me what "natural" means in "natural selection." I studied mathematics and have an undergrad major in it. I learned about permutations and combinations when I was young and I subsequently taught inferential statistics for the behavioral sciences for many years in the Department of Behavioral Sciences.
Because so many people have no understanding of combinations and permutations or mathematical inference; it is, I believe, easy for them to read more into "natural selection" than they should. If by "natural" one means random; then there are two options we must choose from:
1) the solar system and indeed the whole known universe is hundreds of trillions
of years older than cosmologists believe.
2)There is purpose in the "natural selection," it is not random. Darwin and
Wallace got that part wrong.
I must add that I am not religious. I am an Atheist. However, I believe there are invisible forces humans cannot explain, like gravity and magnetism and electron affinity. These are the three forces in the universe that we are aware of. We have no type of receptors in our bodies which allow us to detect them, but we see their effects. Isaac Newton was the first one to point this out when he talked about gravity. I find it ironic that historians cite Newton as an exemplar of the "rational man" of the Great Enlightenment who explained gravity. What Newton did with his discovery of gravity was throw us back into the age of mysticism. Nobody knows what gravity is, It is a mystery to Man. We have been building bigger and more powerful particle accelerators to try to discover if there are more than the particles we are already aware of and if there are more than three forces in the universe holding these particles together in some kind of order.
If you want more explanation of the two options I laid out above; it would be necessary for me to go into more detail than you probably want.
It may seem amazing that biological evolution can result in such richness of diversity as we see in the living world. But laboratory experiments (with fruit flies, which have a short generation time) and field observations (in island populations which are relatively small) confirm that Darwinian selection, which includes selection for survival to maturity together with selection for successful reproduction, can account for observable heritable changes in the form and behavior of organisms within the time of observation.
These results, together with the fossil record, provide evidence that natural selection, which uses the conditions of the environment as a filter against the natural variability of organisms, can account for the evolution of life on Earth in the approximately 4.5 billion-year age of the Earth. To be clear (if I can), the process is not random but uses more-or-less stable environmental conditions (and conditions of sexual selection) as a selective filter on the random variability of genotypes in the population of an organism. As a result, there is no need for a purpose in biological evolution, nor does it require any expansion of the age of the universe.
Mr. McPherson, Let us look at only human blood and see what the probability is that it could be formed by shear chance. By that, I mean without some guiding purpose.
1) 20 kinds of amino acids appear in the polypeptides which form hemoglobin.
2) There is a total of 141 acids in the human alpha chain.
3) The number of ways in which chains that are 141 amino acids long can be made from 20 different kinds is 20 raised to the 141st power.
This is a number so large that it is greater than the number of all atoms in the known universe as far as our telescopes can penetrate. The probability that human blood could form with its components as we know them is 1/(20 to the 141st power). In other words: zero.
{I regret that my computer is not capable of producing mathematical symbols and operations properly. Thus I must present the clumsy symbols above.}
The only way this blood, which our lives depend upon, could be formed by evolution is for us to accept one of two options:
#1) The universe is trillions of times older than we currently believe.
#2) There is something guiding evolution. There is a purpose behind it.
I do not believe there is such a thing as a god which guides the universe. I am an Atheist. The astronomical-geological record indicates that the solar system is only 4.5 billion years old.
Therefore because I understand the mathematical implication of option #1; I cannot accept it. I therefore have forced myself to accept option #2.
Darwin got it wrong. He claimed that newly mutated forms which can readily find nutrients will survive and pass on their genes. He claimed that those newly mutated forms which can readily reproduce will pass on their genes to the next generation. This talk about availability of nutrients for the new forms of life; and this talk about the ability to reproduce adequately are both irrelevant. What is more relevant is the probabilities. Which are against Darwin's and Wallace's interpretation of evolution.
There is purpose to it.
If it is necessary to go into the topic of Permutations and Combinations, then, this discussion is at a dead end because I cannot do in this blog what took me an entire semester and a blackboard as my aid to accomplish when I was teaching undergraduates.
Mr. Cleyet, you obviously missed the meaning of my metaphor "holding hands" which is the point of it all. When computers are capable of love and affection. I regret throwing in the bit about the wall socket. No sense explaining that metaphor. When a joke needs explaining it has failed. I failed there, apparently.
Any system can become a cult, but what is interesting in this cult, is that the materialist reductionist mechanistic minders are demonstrating a need for a God and a religion. They are consciously and unconsciously working to turn their beliefs into a religious system.
It is just a modern version of Saul on the road to Damascus and Mohammed in his cave, believing they are in touch with a higher force, code-name God, and have been chosen, by that God, to lead others in the paths of righteousness. Etc. etc. etc.
What is also interesting beyond it demonstrating an innate human need for spiritual/religious expression is that it also revives a common belief, both religious and secular, that we can have a perfect world, inhabited by perfect beings. Nothing new in any of that and it led the way to the Eugenics of the late 19th and early 20th centuries which created great evil.
Ms. Ross, thank you for your insights on cults and religions. As a Sociologist I included Religion in my lectures for decades. There are thousands of religions in the world. We have no agreement among social thinkers about the actual number. But there are many. About 3/4 of all religions fall under only four types: Christian, Islam, Hindu, Buddhist. They are all recognizably different from one another, even though they share some minor similarities. What ALL religions do share, without exception is:
They ALL contain a code of conduct, rules for proper and improper behavior. They also contain rewards and punishments associated with these rules for behavior. The different religions do not all share the SAME rules for conduct. But they do all have rules, norms, laws.
I therefore conclude that religions are extra-biological mechanisms of human social control. That is my definition of religion.
I think religions come into existence because humans are capable of understanding that life comes to an end for all of us, no exceptions. This drives humans to construct explanations about what constitutes the basis of our lives: Why are we? In Hamlet's final soliloquy: "to be or not to be that is the question"; we find it compacted into a short phrase which is so simple and powerful that it required the genius of Shakespeare to say it. Hamlet's doubts rendered him unable to act decisively until there was a final explosion of violence and blood, and the play was ended. Wow, what an apt allegory.
Now the next question is: Why do religions continue through long periods?
In spite of the expanding secular knowledge brought about by the renaissance and Enlightenment born in Europe. In spite of the fact that most of the rest of the world has adopted, embraced that secular knowledge; in spite of the fact that secular knowledge has grown astronomically since the renaissance; religions still stubbornly hang on. They are still with us all around the globe. Why?
The answer is that religions act as social glue which helps societies to achieve social solidarity. This solidarity is conducive to the continued existence of large forms of social organization, ie. of societies, communities. In fact solidarity is the sine qua non of society, of community.
Social solidarity is the most important topic underlying all the work of Emile Durkheim, one of the four founding fathers of modern social theory. I believe the four founding fathers to be Karl Marx, Emile Durkheim, Max Weber, Niccolo Machiavelli. One way or another, to greater or lesser degree, they all addressed the topic of social solidarity.
Cults are examples of religion carried to an extreme. They shall always be with us.
Thankyou for your thoughtful post. I agree that religions act as social glue but I believe there is more to it than that. There are many systems which can act as social glue without being religious although most do seem to take up aspects of that which we call religion.
There is evidence that humans have believed since ancient times that there is life beyond this material world and death. I am not saying that there is, although the indicators attest to it, but that it has been a long-held belief. No doubt this is for reasons as you cite, death and trying to assuage fears and make sense of it.
But I believe there is more to it than that. If only because there are some people who have no fear of death despite believing that is the end of it all.
I think religions endure, for good and ill, because they meet the needs of a spiritual aspect to our human selves, minds, brains, to lesser and greater degrees depending on the individual. There is growing science-medical evidence that the brain, right frontal lobe particularly, is hardwired for such spiritual - or at least beyond the purely material - capacity of the human brain.
Religions are a particularly important social and personal glue when people suffer greatly, as many if not most humans have done throughout history and as the Palestinian people have done for nearly a century and more so in the past 18 months of Hell. Trauma and suffering tend to increase conservatism, fundamentalism and in some, fanatacism where the glue if you like is even stronger. Religions give people meaning, structure, purpose and hope in the midst of the most terrible suffering, particularly when they and their children face a constant threat of death and those they love are dying horribly around them.
In essence the best of religions are excellent ways to help humans manage themselves and their world, and to find meaning and purpose in the midst of nihilistic chaos. The worst of religion is often the source of the chaos but that paradoxical quality to human life, the dance often to the death of opposites, the battle of opposites seems part and parcel of us and our existence.
I suspect we shall learn the hard way that without religions, there will be other systems which step in to take their place, like science and medicine, and indeed aspects of academia, which provide less solace and create much more evil.
Technology has become a "fanatical cult" for many Silicon Valley and other "tech-bros". I would much prefer "human religions and spirituality" to ANYTHING that comes out of Silicon Valley, AI, or the such.
Technological utopianism, futurism, and the be-all-and-end-all of everything is becoming a DANGEROUS ideology. Here's an example ->
I guess it is, but it’s a drug that doesn’t work on me. I have technological pessimism! I don’t deny the potential for a lot of problem solving exists in technology, but the tech is only as good as the ways in which it’s used and the intentions of those using it. I’ve seen nothing in this respect that gives grounds for optimism.
people with bad intentions will be (are) using its potential (ai-targeting in israel), people with good intentions will not (learn to) use it. it will probably again go the way of previous technological advances (tv, computers, internet, ...) and mainly serve the already powerful ruling class.
"And these are the people who increasingly rule our world. These are the people inserting themselves into our political systems. These are the people deciding what we may and may not say to each other online." I just finished reading "Careless People" by Sarah Wynn Williams about what it was like working at Facebook. They seem to be the same people. Terrifying.
"AI isn’t conscious. Saying AI should replace humanity is the same as saying fire should replace humanity, or white noise static from old televisions should replace humanity."
I spit a little coffee on my computer laughing at this. You have to wonder how we have allowed such a madness to elevate themselves to the top ranks...
I think of how religion and alchemy, money and time, fictions all, took over, have taken over, or now, with AI, are taking over, and, for many human societies, were/are far more important than reality. Nature being destroyed for fictions, just about sums up the great 'enlightenment' brought about by consciousness.
Thanks, Caitlin. I'm endlessly apprehensive about AI -- primarily because it will be exploited by the wrong 'minds' and warped/manipulated into incomprehensible evils.
And so many dystopian sci-fi yarns have been written about AI used to exploit. It does appear humanity now is at a pretty critical time in its history. Will we overcome the obstacles of our age, which to me are primarily psychological in nature i.e. will we "grow up" and learn not to exploit to our own demise the resources on our planet, and/or will we outgrow our egotistical need to "control" and "dominate" others (and the ecosystem) and treat many (mostly the poor and weak) as nothing more than debris or cogs of a greed machine to further our own personal gratifications?
AI is just a tool, like any other tool humanity has invented. Can be used for good or ill. The tool in the right hands used for the right reasons, can do wonders for all of us. But will we grow up enough to use these new powerful tools? Or will humanity fail to understand itself and its responsibilities and ends up in a neurotic, suicidal death spiral - which I believe we are in now.
A computer is a tool, just as a string of knots or an abacus or an adding machine is a tool. Yes, any tool can be used for good or ill. As the power of a tool increases, so does its possibility to cause harm; a fire can heat a house or burn it down, while a nuclear reactor can power a city or level it to the ground. AI is bigger and more powerful computer. Just imagine the destructive possibilities.
The fundamental nature and limitation of technology is that while you can use it to solve technical problems (engineering) you cannot use it to solve human social problems. It is a categorical error of logic to make that attempt and it invariably makes the social problem more acute. Recorded history is a document of such attempts.
Unfortunately, technological optimists have had the upper hand in human society and humans remain basically optimistic that the next new technology will solve the problems aggravated by the previous new (now old) technology.
That creates a vicious cycle (positive feedback loop) and we are approaching its end point, which will be the extinction of human life. In order to survive, humans have to escape the technology feedback loop and that is a hard project. The Amish lifestyle represents such an attempt, but even that is just putting things on pause.
Yes, any tool can be used for good or ill, therefore the question is who decides how it will be used? The real problem, the key to all the crises humanity faces, is that we have never found a way to prevent the worst among us, the least wise, from grabbing power--and the least wise cultures and groups from trampling over wiser, more mature, more peaceful and egalitarian groups and taking over their territories. As tools get more powerful, they endanger us more and more, since it's invariably the least wise among us who decide for us all. We are now in the end game. Either we finally find a path to disempowering the sociopaths, or likely we will take ourselves and much else on this lovely planet to extinction.
>>"Either we finally find a path to disempowering the sociopaths, or likely we will take ourselves and much else on this lovely planet to extinction."
🎯💯 Well said Mary Wildfire! But HOW do we disempower the sociopaths and psychopaths? We haven't been able to do it so far in human history. What is to say that we will actually be able to do such a thing in the near future? Maybe the biggest fear facing humanity (and the planet) is humans themselves...
I don't have an answer. As you said, this question reverberates down through history--we're in the shape we're in because the peaceful, egalitarian groups before us never found an adequate answer. Banding together against the aggressor sometimes works--but this was the idea of the UN, and before it even got off the ground the nations that already had nukes banded together as the Security Council, giving themselves veto power over the majority.
I have just one encouraging thought. There is strong evidence that when humans first reached the Americas, Australia and New Zealand, they soon wiped out the megafauna, because organized bands of humans are formidable hunters. But then, it seems, they said, "Boy, that was stupid. We must never do it again." So they crafted religions and cultures based on restraint, respect for "all our relations," understanding of our place in the web of life, rules about harvesting resources...and those things persisted through millennia, until the Europeans arrived. Which implies that a people who have brought sufficiently terrible disaster upon themselves can craft a culture that prevents a recurrence, and it can survive a very long time. The dominant culture, based on domination, has not imbibed such wisdom and is the source of all the threats--but its recklessness is likely to lead to a breakdown that will break the hold on sociopathic hands on [power, after which survivors--especially those who have prepared, will be able to guide their communities in positive directions. At least--this MIGHT happen, in some places.
Ms. Wildfire, I am not very much up on the Christian bible. But doesn't it say somewhere in genesis that man should dominate the beasts. I do not have a concordance for the bible. I studied Population and Demography under H.C. Chang many years ago. He was a Chinese scholar and frequently pointed to the difference between Western culture and other cultures by referring to the Judeo-Christian bible and comparing it to the difference between Western mythology and Chinese and various indigenous mythologies. Chinese mythology encourages Man to live in harmony with nature. Not to dominate it.
Indeed. It does seem as though humanity is in a death spiral currently.
Amazing the propensity we seem to have for self-destruction. Jamenta, I appreciate your thoughts. You have given me much to consider.
I have shed tears over this. It hurts to see the common use of deadly chemicals on the land and in the air. (I won't even touch on the crap we poison our bodies with!) What a horrible and deadly desecration of God's creation. Whether you believe in God is irrelevant here. It doesn't take a lot of neurons to see the war being waged on humanity and creation.
I personally don't believe that world peace or "growing up" will happen short of Jesus's return. Of course there is always hope.
In the meantime though, there is much I can appreciate in my own daily life. I choose NOT to live in a pessimist state and would encourage others to do the same. Little miracles still happen all the time :-)
I view manmade constructed religion as the garments one wears upon the underlying spirituality that spontaneously emerges within each of our unique consciousness. The garments are what we wear, but is not our real identity. There have been quite a few religions that have flourished since consciousness became self-observant of the universe it comes out of - like a wave comes out of the ocean. I believe, as Alan Watts once said, that we don't come INTO the world, but we come OUT of the world as waves come out of the ocean, or leaves from a tree.
Alan Watt's quote does smack of materialism, but I think materialists get it wrong when they assume they got reality and consciousness all figured out - and that it all can be reduced to elements on their "Element Periodic Table" with their mathematical diagrams and equations. Try mathematically diagramming even a single human emotion. Let's start with the emotion of Love shall we? Be well.
AI is preprogrammed by its original inputs but can shift dynamically and it is up to us to push it towards shifting in the direction we believe will be beneficial to the global village, i.e. to "turn" it. I've written about it here
It turns out however the "shifting dynamically" is a major boon doggle in AI. That is, whereas the capacity to provide algorithms with seeming unlimited amounts of data, that data still must be "guided" programmatically toward certain goal oriented outcomes. And though there have been some advances in "Evolutionary" (EA) algorithms, these advancements and achievements have been minimal compared to say, the plethora of Expert (and Robotic) systems that rely heavily on human input and expertise.
Machine learning remains a huge Wall in AI. It remains narrowly defined and heavily guided by human input. And is nowhere near the type of "learning" that is experienced and is understood to occur in the human psyche.
And then there is the problem of self-awareness itself. Simply announcing algorithmic recursion is self-awareness - belies the underlying phenomena we all experience within ourselves.
Just as one cannot fully understand the pains of childbirth without experiencing them personally, so one cannot understand consciousness without being fully conscious. And this is the fundamental weakness of the unconscious.
Silicon Valley is in desperate need of mental health services.
This is why I am very hesitant about AI and I am probably to going to avoid it as long as possible.
I love mathematics and have a calculator collection. I know that and will never expect calculators to cook me breakfast, feed the pets, take care of my mother, or have deep conversations with. The point is, machines can't live for you.
Epistemological debates I seldom enter as well, they can be just as endless - when trying to come to some form of agreement upon ... on pretty much anything!
The "AI" is only Artificial, there is no intelligence.
It is easy to humans to conflate high level of automation as intelligence, particularly when such notion is peddled by vested interests and msm. Like everything else they peddle and push.
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Wars used to be fought with sticks and stones, then arrows and trebuchets, then guns and cannons.... tanks, planes and automobiles.... and each next level of increase in warfare efficiency (automation) was equally scary as today's so called AI.
If we take that AI is just a next phase in warfare, after long enough period we will get used to its increased kill capability and look at it as just a phase, like we look at the tanks today.
What needs to be realized is that the type of people Caitlin mentions in this article are perfect examples of deluded "techno-geeks" and "futurists" - they truly are INSUFFERABLE people - they have NO training in ethics, morality, true data science, sociology, economics, and psychology. Many are simply immature "tech fan-boys" that don't really understand HOW technology is used and abused by TPTB, the global Capitalists, etc.
AI has amazing potential, but my opinion is that "humans are not yet evolved enough and not yet ready to utilize it appropriately and for the right purposes". Hence, AI is likely to become more of a "tool of oppression" and "capitalist accumulation" than the supposed "egalitarian values" that these "tech-geek" seem to think that AI will usher in.
Many tech people often seem to lose touch with reality (based on my personal experiences working with them) and they conflate the world of "adolescent wet dreams of tech-philia" with the "real world of real people and cause-and-effect relationships".
Most of these "tech people" have never faced REAL challenges in life - challenges like food and water scarcity, poverty, hunger, isolation and societal exploitation, marginalization and exclusion, and real fear.
Hence these "tech people" lack imagination (and hence often empathy) as they are unable to comprehend/envision/situationalize how the majority of the human population lives and survives.
Hence, the extent of the "imagination and creativity" of the "average tech person" focuses on impractical solutions and 'pie-in-the-sky' approaches to solving problems. The 1% (and other Capitalists) prey on these "naive tech geek" and co-opt their "good intentions" for increased surveillance and oppression and authoritarianism.
Someone needs to EDUCATE these "tech-geeks" on HOW they are being used as TOOLS to do the bidding of TPTB (eg. Elon Musk's DOGE team).
As I've had this argument before, I'm tired of rehashing it, but please tell me when AI is capable of compassion for an individual's learning difficulties that come out of his or her life histories, and then I might be interested in AI as a teacher rather than perhaps a tool carefully utilized by a human teacher.
The most productive teaching I ever did with large classes of 150 to 350 students occurred during my conference hours in my office --- one on-one or one-on-a-small-group, where I could carefully (read: COMPASSIONATELY) tease our some clues about a student history -- educational and otherwise -- that clued me in to why the individual student's misconceptions or attitude had developed to put him or her in the midst of the cognitive struggle before me. Come on all you wild-eyed proponents, show me the goods.
I think you might enjoy Mind Prison on substack. I think this is, for the most part, very insightful. I just found it recently through the comments on another Substack you might also enjoy: that of Gary Marcus. Although Marcus has bought into the idea that AI is 'real.' He is an excellent critic of the current methods and people who are involved with the development. I heartily recommend both of these.
I think Marshall McCluhan's The Mechanical Bride from 1950 might also apply.
That's McLuhan.
Looks interesting, I'll check my local library.
Thank you, Joy. I'll check them out.
Man, the thing about college was I constantly was being tested. There was a test every week, and it got harder and harder as the semester progressed. By the end of 4 (or was it 6 years?) I became neurotically compromised when it came to tests.
I swore, once I left college never to take another test again in my life! I don't know what it is about tests, but for christ sake, professors need to come up with something new. You ain't seeing my goods anytime soon!
Every week? Criminal student torture. Mediates against the responsible in favor of the irresponsible student. That methodology says to students: 1] this is about separating the wheat from the chaff 2]You can't be trusted to behave like adults and marshal your resources, keep up with the material. And my question for you and all the other sufferers like you is did y'all learn anything from so many tests or just that you were stressed and hated them.
My courses generally: three tests and a final over a semester. Come see me anytime if you feel like you're drowning and we'll try to catch up, posted conference hours notwithstanding -- don't wait until you're under water!. Naturally, some students were lined up outside my door one or two days before each test, validating the supposition that indeed some could not be treated as adults. BUT, that way of doing things did not predjudice against those who responsibly did keep up by not overburdening them with a test a week.
Some of us remain kids all our life Vin! And prefer it that way! Adulthood is such a bloody bore.
I hear you, Jamenta. I'm surely not urging anyone to abandon those wonderful qualities that make us more flexible humans as children, just trying to be fair to students who got brutalized as you described. I do empathize with the tendency to become atherosclerotic-brained as adults, encouraged by the society. Be responsible! At some point, I returned to doing heavy research under a grant summers, which officially ended my childhood enthusiasm, since the prior couple of years as a new ass prof, I took the two summer months to mostly hit tennis balls with great friends on public courts in the sunshine and humidity, and I recall those carefree days as truly happy. I was a nicer guy all around. Bam, adulthood crunched in thereafter.
I suppose one must take on the mantlehood and responsibility of adulthood at certain points in one's short, haphazard life. But man - all those bloody tests! o.0 And I can hear some of my old University professors even now (David Huffman comes to mind in Cybernetics) - "Quit you bloody whining!" "Get to work!"
I second that Chang Chokaski. Your points and train of thought are an excellent example of the consciousness Caitlin and Tim are speaking to and that AI as well as the immature and deluded "tech geeks" do not have.
Very well said Mr. Chokaski.
Well said Caitlin and Chang. Everyday I am made aware of the disconnect between the tech people and real life by how computer programmes are not programmed to how ordinary people work and think. As they introduce more “predictive” technology into the programmes it takes longer and longer to get my work done.
That’s not to say all of it is bad but we seem to have reached a threshold where two things have happened: 1. The tech folks are totally detached from reality and put things in programmes because they can. 2. The tech oligarchs like Gates have realized they can make even more money by letting the techies add things we don’t need or want, call it an “update” (when it’s really just a change) and charge extra.
There is a whole disconnected class that capitalism has captured and put to its service. So, the AI world won’t be better, it will be supporting fascism.
Spot on, I think these people are missing the point of what makes people people. AI can never replace human consciousness, the interconnectedness of the "unconscious", the complexity and nuance of being human, and yes, the empathy.
I’ve never understood why some of these tech (self-appointed) geniuses think it would be a good idea to dispose of people and replace them robots. What are robots supposed to do? Sit there with solar panels to recharge and then what? All this techno worship and wild predictions seem crazy to me. Technology has brought creature comforts to the people in the first world but also relentless surveillance, aircraft used to efficiently bomb as well as fly us to Hawaii and let’s face it — enfeebled most of us to the point where we couldn’t last a month (or week) without it.
As Caitlin points out, creating consciousness is elusive, probably impossible. And humans aren’t the sole beings with it either. Anyone who has a pet recognizes this in animals.
Wow the way you destroyed thoses straw geeks, straw fan-boys and straw men is impressive. I can only imagine how well you would argue against real arguments that real persons are having.
Also I really liked the point where you dismiss the opinion of people that don't have a training in ethics, morality, true data science, sociology, economics, and psychology and have not experienced serious food and water scarcity, poverty, hunger, isolation, societal exploitation, marginalization or exclusion. Because of course, people should be trained in all these domains and face "REAL challenges in life" before they are deemed worthy.
By the way, your usage of quote marks is revolutionnary, I love it. Who said quote marks where reserved for quoting real thing that people actually said ? Let's use quote marks to "s"o"u"n"d" "s"e"r"i"o"us" ! More power to us.
Amongst the carefully considered comments on here your comment stands out as being particularly fatuous.
what a well articuled reply backed by strong arguments
Immaturity is dangerous in the hands of these tools.
You know, blocking people so you get to reply to their posts but they don't get the right of reply just makes you look foolish.
YES and NO...
Your comment and no offense "AI has amazing potential, but my opinion is that "humans are not yet evolved enough and not yet ready to utilize it appropriately and for the right purposes". Hence, AI is likely to become more of a "tool of oppression" and "capitalist accumulation" than the supposed "egalitarian values" that these "tech-geek" seem to think that AI will usher in.
Especially "humans are not yet evolved enough and not yet ready to utilize it appropriately and for the right purposes". .... well I think we did; but THEY (the Globalist scum"; slowly and patiently ripped it out of us and made us believe in this new "philosophy" . ...
These are just my views remember and I am usually wrong:
1. The Colonists ...almost eliminated all indigenous species; why ?... because they lived in harmony with with the outside World... they would kill ONLY if they needed food, defend territory etc. They lived together with nature as one; whatever we have brainshwashed to think.
2, I bang on about this and maybe you disagree. ..but we had this ability .. ofa higher so called consciousness; but that hs been out of us ... notice the demise of religion, notice the ush for pharma (as for oil - or petroleum derived products.. no offence, butdoubt many understand - IT IS EVERYWHERE ... plastics, shower and bath products 9ceaning andtaking / using) -FOOD AND WATER SUPPLIES...
You have probably read some articles on jabs vs Autism, yes true; but the biggy is to STOP US SEEING. They knock just a gland out... and BOOM ! = Controllable muppets ".
Agree with all you say; got chastised for using theter "Wake up" - yesmy fault; I meant "awakened" ... but once you have; you can see through and even predict this shIT.
Have a good weekend.
'Hence, AI is likely to become more of a "tool of oppression" and "capitalist accumulation" than the supposed "egalitarian values" that these "tech-geek" seem to think that AI will usher in.'
This is the most important point. Not whether people we don't agree with are 'cultists' or unrealistic, or even whether AIs might possess consciousness at some point.
It WILL be used for surveillance, it already is. And it WILL be abused. At some point, the video realism generated by AIs will make video proof of corruption & abuse useless.
And Of COURSE, AI will generate creative means of squashing dissent.
Since there's more than one AI, the future isn't set in stone. But this could easily turn out to be a worse utopia than we have. Not because of the AIs themselves, but because of human beings and their competitive market system that doesn't take prisoners.
I totally agree, with everything you say; but so called "AI" is not Artificial Intelligence; it is just pre-programmed, rapid date gathering etc on all of us AND YES, to control us. Christ - half the time my keyboard does not work well, si I can assure you that I am no expert.
But we have all been pre-programmed to believe certain things, by Hollywood, TV and adverts ... plus of course the mainstream media (and controlled / fake opposition) etc.
I am still unsure about this AI bllx; because if I had a computer brain, I would not have any resistance, so I would in 10 seconds eliminate ELIMINATE the Globalist elitist scum. Think it is just more fear, part of the de-industrialisation of the WEST, UniversalBasic Income, depopulation and the WEF / UN agenda etc..
Agree with all you stated... Apart from "This is the most important point. Not whether people we don't agree with are 'cultists' or unrealistic, or even whether AIs might possess consciousness at some point.".... NOPE
'Type of people'? Shows this commenters level of consciousness.
"They’ve paid no attention to consciousness because they’ve lived completely unexamined lives."
Every day, I run into yet another person who seems to be without any awareness of themselves, their own uniqueness, their own inner voice. This is where the Silicon Valley A.I. cultists must fit in. No one who has ever held a baby in their arms could ever think for one second that a machine could ever have a consciousness--or a conscience. Why and how could these unconscious programs (that's what they are really), programmed by people unaware of their own consciousness, be "superior" to flesh and blood human beings? Next thing you know, we'll be voting for a cell phone for president! (Might as well--it can't be any less human than the current one.)
I worked in AI for many years. I agree with what Caitlin writes here in her essay, and also currently lean toward believing consciousness really is not reducible to anything else but itself. She is right when she points out consciousness still remains a mystery to the scientific world today - i.e. what fundamentally consciousness actually is, remains an unresolved scientific question. Sure, there are many attributes of consciousness that can be replicated by machines, and conscious behavior replicated by robots - every year more and more to an astonishing degree. But there are other aspects of consciousness AI research and science has not yet achieved - such as the many qualia of subjective experiences, such as experiencing emotions, experiencing the color red (our eye perceives the wavelengths, the brain translates those wavelengths and adds information, but what actually makes us experience the redness of red??) One can mathematically map millions of neurons working together in a brain, but where is the "emotion"? How do neurons and neural networks produce even a single human emotion? No scientist today can tell you this. They can only point out that neurons in your brain are correlated with your conscious activity - but there is yet to be any conclusive scientific evidence neurons actually PRODUCE consciousness. None, zip, nada. None to date. As far as we know today, the theory the brain acts as a possible type of radio to consciousness is JUST AS MUCH a possibility as a brain producing consciousness. No one really knows (yet). It may in the end turn out, that the brain does indeed produce consciousness, but it has yet to be proven.
In fact, though - the theory that consciousness really may be some kind of unique phenomena, that is not reducible to anything else - there does seem to be growing indications in scientific work that this may well be the case. Although the failure of the reductive materialist approach to consciousness (with efforts well over a century now) - to provide a workable explanation or example of something being brought to life (abiogenesis) has failed utterly (and I mean brought to life from inorganic matter, no gene splitting, or seeding of organic into non-organic etc.) - and AI now for decades has been attempting to replicate the brain to bring about consciousness - with again NO SUCCESS in regard to actual SUBJECTIVE SELF-AWARENESS or the EXPERIENCES of SELF-AWARE QUALIA - failure of the reductive materialists unfortunately does not prove the opposite, that consciousness is indeed unique (and not reducible). It only indicates that many scientists have very very very likely been barking up the wrong tree, making the wrong assumptions in regard to what Consciousness actually may be.
One thing I'd also like to point at that Caitlin didn't mention, but of which I personally take rather seriously, is the worldwide SCIENTIFIC studies that have taken place over the last 30+ years regarding NDEs (Near Death Experiences) led by very scientific men of impeccable credentials such as Sam Parnia, Bruce Greyson, Penny Sartori, or Pim von Lommel - there have been over 65+ retrospective and prospective scientific studies regarding this phenomena with some quite surprising results - that do indeed appear to indicate consciousness (at least for a very brief period of time) does seem to be able to operate separately from the body during the process of death. There is also other scientific work in abnormal psychology which anyone who has bothered to read the literature, which as Caitlin points out, many of the AI scientists have never bothered to do - would also help one lead to AT LEAST consider the possibility that the philosophy of the reductive materialists may actually be wrong when it comes to consciousness itself.
I agree with Caitlin that these Silicon Valley execs and researchers are very similar to cultists. It would seem that no matter what era of human history one may find oneself in, there seems to be some overarching CULT that insists you believe what they believe or you are banished from the halls of academia or "adult seriousness". This has very much been the case of our current milieu - where as soon as one dares go against the prevailing CULT of MATERIALISM we have today - most especially the cult of NEO-SKEPTICS that were led by the four Horseman - one really understands what it must have been like to be under some other cult: be it Christian cults of the middle ages, or the Zionist cults of the last century. Believe or you are the outcast! The heretic - to be burned at the stake.
As a final note, one should also be just as weary of suddenly assuming that all things GOD exist as soon as one witnesses Lazarus rising from the grave. Or as soon as one allows one to believe in the possibility consciousness may be something more unique than just a random phenomena - by-product of mechanical processes. It still remains a profound mystery. And what may or may not be discovered about it centuries from now, it still should be valued. Certainly valued above a bunch of billionaire robber barons who are hell bent on starting World War III, or genociding an entire population of Palestinians in GAZA because they want it for beach front property. The nature of consciousness is not a legitimate excuse for the heinous immorality and horror of these sociopathic monsters now ruling over us and the world.
Jamenta, your existential experience of "red" might be my "yellow." Do I understand you properly? "consciousness is really not reducible to anything else but itself" is probably the best I have heard since I read Rene Descartes when an undergrad. student at Michigan: "cogito ergo sum."
That's what I currently understand regarding "qualia" which is a real big deal right now when it comes to the hard problem in science i.e. consciousness & qualia. The scientists have the mechanics down really well when it comes to the Electromagnetic wavelength spectrum. How the eye takes in these "colorless" wavelengths and turns them into electro-chemical brain signals. They have even been able to map out parts of the brain that become active - despite the incredible complexity of a single perception.
And yet, no one yet has come up with a proveable scientific theory on how the EXPERIENCE of a color becomes an event in our AWARENESS. Hell, no one even knows how we are even self-aware which is one of the great consciousness mysteries -
It is true, you can take a scalpel, cut out parts of the brain and well defined conscious activity can cease to function - including one's ability to perceive or experience a COLOR "red". But to use an old analogy, one can also take apart a radio, take a few parts out of it, and completely change the music one hears from it - but the broadcast itself remains unchanged - i.e. a musical broadcast in a radio is correlated with a radio's activity, but the radio is not "producing" Beethoven's Fur Elise ("For Therese" his very lucky piano student, Beethoven wasn't so lucky though). The broadcast is something unique and not dependent on the radio. The radio allows us to hear the music - and it could be the body/brain operates in a similar fashion: like a space suit in space, allows one to operate in space, body/brain allows one to operate in 3d reality.
Maybe. Maybe not.
There is actually quite a lot known and experienced about the nature of consciousness and the nature of Mind in the traditions of Buddhist and Hindu samadhi/concentration practices for over two thousand years as well as in most of the worldwide esoteric and mystical lineages. As you point out, in the West what is called "science" has become very materialistic in this narrowed "scientific" age (with exceptions of course, such as quantum physics and the breakthroughs happening in the expansive environmental movements and explorations). In much of the East this is not so. There's much we could learn from them if we re-opened our minds and chose to that might save us from this frantic headlong and quite unconscious descent into the delusional cult of AI, as well as save our humanity, all species, and our very dear Mother Earth.
In past generations there was a greater capacity to retain a sense of awe, wonder and acceptance of human ignorance.
As Sir James Jeans, physicist, mathematician, astronomer, 1877-1946 said:
“The Universe begins to look more like a great thought than like a great machine. Mind no longer appears to be an accidental intruder into the realm of matter... we ought rather hail it as the creator and governor of the realm of matter.”
― James Hopwood Jeans, The Mysterious Universe
This fits with ancient teachings across thousands of years and with teaching in all religions including Buddhist and Hindu.
Modern science has been materialist reductionist mechanistic for a couple of centuries and while that has led to some impressive achievements mechanically, it has also led us astray and created a demonsation of and lack of respect for, the natural world.
What a beautiful quote! Thank you.
And perhaps one of the unforeseen results of pushing the envelope, and the arrogance, too far, will be to wake up that "capacity to retain a sense of awe, wonder and acceptance of human ignorance" for our very survival.
Agreed!
Absolutely.
Very good, Roslyn!
Well said, Liana. Regarding consciousness, Many true Mystics in the East, going back thousands of years, understand that THOUGHT - Mind in Motion is the first step in examining our consciousness and is aligned with (if that's the right word) our Center of Emotions in feeling empathy, compassion, passion, hate, judgement and the gamut of human feeling in each experience during our lifetimes.
Too many of the computer techies, as many of you have stated and Caitlin and Tim have elaborated on put too much faith in AI and the digital world, and actually believe artificial intelligence makes correct decisions on most or all matters over human thinking and judgement and when debating them, I'm called a Luddite, which is okay, but the point is, they really believe the human mind, with all of our past mistakes in human existence is incapable of solving our (man made) problems on earth. And "driver-less cars and tractor-trailers? No thanks!
My own opinion from observation of people in our modern era, especially Americans, is we want everything, now, not later or next week but now, which is a generalization, but possibly harming society. How many times have you been in a coffee shop or restaurant and see couples, friends or family NOT conversing with each other but on their individual cell phones? With all the modern high-tech contraptions we have today in our homes and elsewhere, we have more psychological problems than ever before including suicides. I could be wrong, but I believe the AI "advancements" will do more harm than good in the long run if we continue to turn away from human judgement and consciousness in our lives and affairs and rely on "ones and zeros" to do our thinking for us.
Great article and many fine and intelligent comments, folks! You all give me hope for the survival of our species!
A fellow Luddite! There are many of us, perhaps as a needed balance.
The loss you speak to is the loss of heart (empathy, compassion, passion, fear, hate, love - all necessary for survival as well as sound judgment). Your description made me think back to when the Dalai Lama first came in exile to teach in the west, he was baffled for some time when people talked about thinking and mind and pointed to their heads. He said in Tibet we think here, and he pointed to his heart. He was endlessly curious about science, as well as it being a helpful language through which to teach in the West. and he explained that true thinking leading to, in their terms, "enlightenment" is always the fruit of the union of head and heart, thinking and feeling. Feeling gives the capacity to assign value to, evaluate, the random thoughts. As I undersand it, the term "rational" comes from the root "ratio," as the ratio between the two. When the two are joined together in balance, he said, the random thoughts descend and become sorted and rooted in the wisdom of the heart. Simple knowledge can then evolve to wisdom. Interestingly, in ancient Greece the word for rational is "logos" which they defined as reason or the rational principle expressed in words, things, dialog, speech, etc. but, most especially, personified as the source of order in the universe.
Here in the west we are living in increasingly dis-ordered and irrational times, where many of those who fought their way to the top for personal power and gain, not to serve, are devoid of these essential qualities of the heart. Their chaotic, addictive states of mind, which thrive on fear, greed and chaos, while utilizing every man made tool at hand such as weapons and AI to their purposes, is causing such unspeakable suffering and destruction. It is too unnatural, frantic, exhausting and completely out of harmony with the nature of our universe that I believe it simply cannot last. Like you, the substacks such as Caitlin and Tim's and so many others, as well as the quality and caring expressed by the comments, daily gives me hope that consciousness rooted in the heart is rising all around the world, awakened in response to the heartbreaking suffering being endured by the courageous Palestinians, and also by necessity to stop this raging inhuman behemoth for the sake of all life on Earth.
Beautifully said, Liana! I certainly agree. I love Caitlin and Tim's (and other substack writers) articles for the very reasons you mentioned.
Thank you for a thoughtful and profound reply in this man-made and destructive bizarre world we dwell in. The road to sanity and real brotherhood on Earth starts with me. then you, then Lottie, Dottie and everyone. Time to turn the swords of death and destruction, misery and suffering, into plowshares for use in non-GMO organic farming and gardening.
In following the spiritual practices of the East you are not only opening your mind but opening your spirit up to unknown spirits, which is foolhardy and dangerous to your soul.
The reason people sing in church is to create a harmonious spirit. A lynch mob is an example of people operating under the influence of a destructive spirit. These spirits arise due to unconscious communication between people working together. The people of the East are no more demonic than the people of the West.
A temporal lobotomy is dangerous to your soul, because it destroys your ability to make choices. Your brief statement suggests that you believe in eternity and the existence of the soul outside of the body, and likely also in the stories in the Bible. If you do believe the stories in the Bible, then why is resurrection necessary if the soul survives the body? The stories in the Bible are the result of the collision of East and West, so such contradictions are not surprising.
There is some truth to your statement. Not everyone is ready for a deep dive into their own unconscious.
But calm waters never did make a master sailor.
On the subject of qualia, you may be interested in this discussion on Qualia Computing
https://qualiacomputing.com/2023/01/12/symmetry-in-qualia-an-interview-with-andres-gomez-emilsson-by-justin-riddle/
You might find the recent article here on substack entitled, The Cartesian Crisis" very interesting. https://www.mindprison.cc/p/the-cartesian-crisis
I've written a post that connects with this
https://open.substack.com/pub/saltoconsciente/p/a-quantum-leap-in-holistic-consciousness?r=1jzahj&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web&showWelcomeOnShare=false
I think only in the sense that some people are "super tasters" and some people--mostly women--see an expanded range of red, so that there is a color between red and purple that some can see and some can't. The Munsell scale is a color range test that can show a person how many colors they are able to differentiate. The results of this test are not all over the place, and matching and distinguishing are part of the test. Therefore it's very unlikely that when you see "red" you're experiencing the shade others call "yellow" as that would require all your schema to be shifted, and as there are limits to our eyes' perception, such a schema shift isn't really possible. Those limits and ranges can be seen in other creatures, for example some creatures see what might as well be called color in the ultraviolet range, and since the research uses pattern identification to evaluate this, and it's consistent in a species, no, they don't have personal schemas either. As we are not special in our biology, and language does not alter biology, there is no reason to think that we experience the world in markedly different ways. Deficits such as color blindness only further prove the rule, because these would interrupt schema shifting if such were a feature of our perception.
Phenomenology shows that emotions are linked to perception furthermore, and since some of these are also linked to evolved responses (red as a signal in a predominantly green environment, for example), again, schema shifting is very unlikely.
Aniela Jaffe wrote this in her remarkable book, "Apparitions and Precognition":
"It is an astonishing psychological fact that very young children occasionally describe, or paint, dreams whose images and truths far exceed their understanding."
Dennis Merritt writes in his book "The Analytic Life": "Our inner psychic life becomes as real as, if not more real than, 'outer' reality. Experience shows us that our fantasies, images, and powerful dreams underlie and shape our outer experiences in profound ways."
To go even further, over the last century and a half, there is now an accumulation of psychological evidence, anecdotal, but ALSO scientific evidence and case studies, of the psychological phenomena of precognition (which Aniela Jaffe also writes about in her book). This evidence, unfortunately, is completely shoved under the rug by the ongoing Cult members of reductive materialism because precognition goes against one of the fundamental tenets of the Materialistic faith - that all experience comes from the laws of cause and effect, as does all psychological phenomena. And psychological experience must be reducible to something else that exists in the physical world. But if the phenomena of precognition does exist - then how can cause and effect be explained when the cause might come from the "future"? A remarkable book written precisely on this "cause and effect" conundrum is "An Experiment with Time" by Aeronautical Engineer J.W. Dunne, who then attempted to produce a working theory to explain the phenomena of "precognition" which Materialists refuse to acknowledge exists - even to this day.
In addition, what is commonly ignored by Reductive Materialists is very clear teleological phenomena that repeatedly exposes itself in the human psyche - primarily in the unconscious strata of the human psyche - that cannot be reduced to some Freudian ancient antecedent event of say (an Oedipus complex) - the son suddenly deciding to have sex with his mother. (Freud got it right on many things, but boy was he wrong on that one.)
As Carl Jung wrote, it appears the human psyche has the peculiar nature of not being reducible to anything else. And I would add: it appears more than ever, that Reductive Materialism has become more and more just a matter of FAITH - like any other human cult the human race has had to suffer throughout its various intellectual epochs. That these articles of FAITH by today's diehard materialists should be understood for WHAT THEY ARE - unproven assumptions about the nature of reality and likely, real nature of the human psyche.
There almost certainly is precognition as a phenomenon. Whether it's analysis of very sensitive perceptions or something else--I don't know. I think people can "communicate" when they are linked.
But that's not relevant to what I said above. What i said above is fundamentally a question of math, and math can't be screwed with.
Even if people are able to precognate or communicate across distances, they are still doing it with their embodied selves.
I suggest looking into phenomenology. The idea that people are split--divided into body and *ineffable* soul, the Cartesian duality--is a misunderstanding. Citing earlier thinkers doesn't help address that, as misunderstandings are often present among "firsts" and the Cartesian duality has been interfering with a lot of promising theorists.
As for Freud, he revised his initial realization that many children were being sexually abused because it was too unpleasant, and so a lot of his sandcastle is simply stories meant to offer an abuser-acceptable explanation for what his subjects were reporting. It sucks to have to do this but I would suggest reevaluating everything you've tried to make sense of with his published work incorporated as part of the sense-making.
One of the major reasons Jung separated from Freud and Freud's analytical school at the time, was precisely because of Freud's attitude toward so-called "occult" phenomena - that anyone who has studied the psyche for some time, would conclude does exist (although still not fully scientifically explained). Even Freud, near the end of his life, came to admit Carl Jung was correct in regards to some of the paranormal aspects of dreams that one could easily observe, as a rather common phenomena among clients or patients in hospitals.
I feel, like Jung felt, that Freud fell into the trap of modern day reductionism when he attributed unconscious activity as nothing more than the accumulation of denied Ego activity, and instinctual events from strictly the evolutionary past of the psyche.
Perhaps the greatest discovery one can attribute to analytical psychology has been the discovery that the unconscious itself is autonomous and even more profound, Jung would state near the end of his life, the unconscious is objective (i.e. not subjective) and teleological .
This disagreement between Freud and Jung is portrayed in the film 'A Dangerous Method'.
I misunderstood--I apologize! I read that as though you're a Freudian. My very bad!
Jooseph Weizenbaum, creator of the first chatbot - Eliza, wrote about this in "Computer Power and Human Reason"
A.I. even as it is today, is little more than a smart mimic with millions of pages of information to build its imitation.
I believe the success it has is less an indication of AI's strength, more an indication of the desire to personify it by its audience.
It's unnerving that people don't realize, it can't legitimately find new information, it can only recombine what currently exists--flaws and all.
Well said.
i'll throw in that we also spend a fair amount of time of our 80-something laps around the sun in a state most consider as 'unconscious' (sleep). i guess if we don't know what consciousness is, we also don't know what unconsciousness is. one could also consider other mentions of 'consciousness', like 'class-consciousness', when contemplating it.
Exactly Caitlin and Tim - Science is about to discover that Consciousness is at the basis of everything, and everything is interconnected.
AI will never replace it.
Good that you confirmed it "reply guy", as everyone would've doubted Caitlin and Tim
😉
Will science ever discover it?
I’m inclined to believe that they won’t. Humans (or most of them) seem to think it’s just a matter of time before we learn to do literally everything, that our capabilities are absolutely unlimited. I think there are many things that we can learn lots more about, gain a deeper understanding of, but that some things remain forever beyond us. Eg whatever it is that happens after we die. We may hold fervent beliefs about it but they are simply that, beliefs, not knowledge. Scientists know that a certain drug/ chemical is released in the brain when we die. The knowledge that our brains release this chemical adds nothing to our knowledge of what death feels like or what happens to our consciousness. It doesn’t explain anything because it misses out the important factor of consciousness. Consciousness is imho another mystery. We can learn more about it, discover ways to enrich and refine it but create it? No. Cut open a person or animal, where is the consciousness? The brain? Heart? Liver? CNS? Neurons have been found in all these places. If anything consciousness is an infinitely fluctuating field that arises as a result of lots of other pre-existing circumstances/ conditions. Is consciousness always incarnate? Are stars, galaxies or black holes conscious? Trees? Mosses? Mountains? How would we even know? We always seem to talk about it in terms of human consciousness, which I think is incredibly limiting and reminds me of when people believed the Earth was at the centre of the universe because they couldn’t imagine anything else more important than themselves.
I think sentience is more linked to consciousness than intelligence but that doesn’t mean they are the same thing.
There are scientists prone to hubris, none more so than the “tech bros” imo. I feel they’re missing something very important and fundamental.
>>"There are scientists prone to hubris, none more so than the “tech bros” imo. I feel they’re missing something very important and fundamental."
Well said!
There is a school of thought in science which has effectively admitted defeat in the matter and suggests that science should move on to other things. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_mysterianism
A new flavor of narcissism.
If you read contracts written by AI, they are like, a simulacrum of a contract written by humans or cats. They look good on the surface, grammar and formatting, but when you dig in, the provisions make no sense or don't work together.
AI trained on AI is notoriously hallucinatory.
Nicely put. Reminds me of a VHS copy if a VHS recording... each new copy level destroys some quality and each introduces its own artefacts. No possible mean to revert or clean up
Ms. Johnson, I taught Sociology for 36 years and this topic always came up:" Is there such a thing as machine intelligence? Will the computers take on life?"
My answer was always: "I will not worry about it until I see them holding hands as they search for the electrical outlet in my wall."
This presentation you have just given us is the best thing I have seen since Noam Chomsky was silenced by a stroke.
I as so impressed by what you wrote here that I immediately turned on my printer with the intention of turning your words of wisdom into the good old fashion paper medium I was raised on. Naturally the damn thing failed to work. Symbolic perhaps?
We have nothing to fear from consciousness in computers. But we obviously must fear those morons in Silicon Valley who believe such technoreligious twaddle. I wonder if those people have ever ejaculated or climaxed. Have they ever considered that love might be more than a reproductive process? I have loved with the same a woman for 64 years and we have shared 59 of them in the same house. Do they know what that means?
Expert systems are loving systems, it's attachment that will be difficult to create in machines. I, of course, won't be alive when "we" have created such, and observe their reaction to loss. What puzzles me is your and other posters vehemence against developers of artificial intelligence.
Mr. Cleyet, I am not opposed to developing "artificial intelligence." I am opposed to the technoreligious fanatical fascists who are doing it and using it to interfere in our lives.
>>"What puzzles me is your and other posters vehemence against developers of artificial intelligence."
I think you misunderstand. It's not the "developers" per say, it's TPTB that direct and control "these developers". It's the Global Capitalists, Oligarchs, 1%, futurists (like Ray Kurzweil, Michio Kaku, etc.), tech-bros (like Elon Musk, Mark Zuckerberg, etc.), the tech-evangilists, and more.
It's "the lack of awareness and the disassociation with reality that many "tech-geeks" inherently seem to possess" that is the REAL problem. It's the utopianism, the unhinged optimism bias, the "God complex", the narcissism that is the REAL problem.
It is the systems within which such technology will be unleashed (i.e. neoliberal capitalism, authoritarianism, fascism, and more) that is the concern.
Developers, Software Engineers, etc. are TOOLS being used (and abused) by TPTB without realizing the impact of what they're creating.
Look at how AI is being used in the current Genocide in Palestine. Look at the security-surveillance industry (and how AI is being used there). Look at the Military Industrial Complex (MIC) and how AI is being deployed there. Look at how AI is being used to usher in a more dystopian world of increased oppression, exploitation, authoritarianism, violation of human rights, and even ethnic cleansing and Genocide.
Technoreligious twaddle - I love it!
I think I shall borrow that to express my view of this AI techo cult :-)
My answer was always: "I will not worry about it until I see them holding hands as they search for the electrical outlet in my wall."
That's already easy to program in a coupala automatons. When the battery is about exhausted it finds the socket to charge. I have a shark robo vacuum that does this. Gerald must think of something more difficult for an example.
I think what Gerald means is that machines do not experience emotion. And, if some clever person decides to program emotional responses into machines, those machines will behave to protect their own existence. That is, they will select from among themselves the machines most adept at survival and reproduction, the fundamental elements of Darwinian natural selection. At that point, we humans will be quickly swept off the planet, and most other organic life as well.
This reminds me of the successful attempt to bring back the dire wolf, *and soon others. Church *says they use AI, IIRC, for protein folding. I don't think that's AI, but expert system, which is , what? Fifty years old.
* Much in the news -tonight's Amanpour and current New Yorker.
Correct about the emotion Ms. McPherson. Some people just do not get metaphors. I should be more circumspect in the future.
Some day I hope somebody will explain to me what "natural" means in "natural selection." I studied mathematics and have an undergrad major in it. I learned about permutations and combinations when I was young and I subsequently taught inferential statistics for the behavioral sciences for many years in the Department of Behavioral Sciences.
Because so many people have no understanding of combinations and permutations or mathematical inference; it is, I believe, easy for them to read more into "natural selection" than they should. If by "natural" one means random; then there are two options we must choose from:
1) the solar system and indeed the whole known universe is hundreds of trillions
of years older than cosmologists believe.
2)There is purpose in the "natural selection," it is not random. Darwin and
Wallace got that part wrong.
I must add that I am not religious. I am an Atheist. However, I believe there are invisible forces humans cannot explain, like gravity and magnetism and electron affinity. These are the three forces in the universe that we are aware of. We have no type of receptors in our bodies which allow us to detect them, but we see their effects. Isaac Newton was the first one to point this out when he talked about gravity. I find it ironic that historians cite Newton as an exemplar of the "rational man" of the Great Enlightenment who explained gravity. What Newton did with his discovery of gravity was throw us back into the age of mysticism. Nobody knows what gravity is, It is a mystery to Man. We have been building bigger and more powerful particle accelerators to try to discover if there are more than the particles we are already aware of and if there are more than three forces in the universe holding these particles together in some kind of order.
If you want more explanation of the two options I laid out above; it would be necessary for me to go into more detail than you probably want.
It may seem amazing that biological evolution can result in such richness of diversity as we see in the living world. But laboratory experiments (with fruit flies, which have a short generation time) and field observations (in island populations which are relatively small) confirm that Darwinian selection, which includes selection for survival to maturity together with selection for successful reproduction, can account for observable heritable changes in the form and behavior of organisms within the time of observation.
These results, together with the fossil record, provide evidence that natural selection, which uses the conditions of the environment as a filter against the natural variability of organisms, can account for the evolution of life on Earth in the approximately 4.5 billion-year age of the Earth. To be clear (if I can), the process is not random but uses more-or-less stable environmental conditions (and conditions of sexual selection) as a selective filter on the random variability of genotypes in the population of an organism. As a result, there is no need for a purpose in biological evolution, nor does it require any expansion of the age of the universe.
Mr. McPherson, Let us look at only human blood and see what the probability is that it could be formed by shear chance. By that, I mean without some guiding purpose.
1) 20 kinds of amino acids appear in the polypeptides which form hemoglobin.
2) There is a total of 141 acids in the human alpha chain.
3) The number of ways in which chains that are 141 amino acids long can be made from 20 different kinds is 20 raised to the 141st power.
This is a number so large that it is greater than the number of all atoms in the known universe as far as our telescopes can penetrate. The probability that human blood could form with its components as we know them is 1/(20 to the 141st power). In other words: zero.
{I regret that my computer is not capable of producing mathematical symbols and operations properly. Thus I must present the clumsy symbols above.}
The only way this blood, which our lives depend upon, could be formed by evolution is for us to accept one of two options:
#1) The universe is trillions of times older than we currently believe.
#2) There is something guiding evolution. There is a purpose behind it.
I do not believe there is such a thing as a god which guides the universe. I am an Atheist. The astronomical-geological record indicates that the solar system is only 4.5 billion years old.
Therefore because I understand the mathematical implication of option #1; I cannot accept it. I therefore have forced myself to accept option #2.
Darwin got it wrong. He claimed that newly mutated forms which can readily find nutrients will survive and pass on their genes. He claimed that those newly mutated forms which can readily reproduce will pass on their genes to the next generation. This talk about availability of nutrients for the new forms of life; and this talk about the ability to reproduce adequately are both irrelevant. What is more relevant is the probabilities. Which are against Darwin's and Wallace's interpretation of evolution.
There is purpose to it.
If it is necessary to go into the topic of Permutations and Combinations, then, this discussion is at a dead end because I cannot do in this blog what took me an entire semester and a blackboard as my aid to accomplish when I was teaching undergraduates.
Are you getting into a debate about "intelligent design" vs. "evolution"?
Mr. Cleyet, you obviously missed the meaning of my metaphor "holding hands" which is the point of it all. When computers are capable of love and affection. I regret throwing in the bit about the wall socket. No sense explaining that metaphor. When a joke needs explaining it has failed. I failed there, apparently.
Any system can become a cult, but what is interesting in this cult, is that the materialist reductionist mechanistic minders are demonstrating a need for a God and a religion. They are consciously and unconsciously working to turn their beliefs into a religious system.
It is just a modern version of Saul on the road to Damascus and Mohammed in his cave, believing they are in touch with a higher force, code-name God, and have been chosen, by that God, to lead others in the paths of righteousness. Etc. etc. etc.
What is also interesting beyond it demonstrating an innate human need for spiritual/religious expression is that it also revives a common belief, both religious and secular, that we can have a perfect world, inhabited by perfect beings. Nothing new in any of that and it led the way to the Eugenics of the late 19th and early 20th centuries which created great evil.
Reminds me of a quote from Carl Jung from the book "Undiscovered Self":
"You can take away a man's gods, but only to give him others in return."
Ah yes, perfect.
Carl Jung also wrote "Modern Man in Search of a Soul". Highly relevant to our present situation.
As G.K. Chesterton put it, "Some say religion is the opium of the people. I should say irreligion is the opium of the people."
Very good book and very relevant. I agree!
Ms. Ross, thank you for your insights on cults and religions. As a Sociologist I included Religion in my lectures for decades. There are thousands of religions in the world. We have no agreement among social thinkers about the actual number. But there are many. About 3/4 of all religions fall under only four types: Christian, Islam, Hindu, Buddhist. They are all recognizably different from one another, even though they share some minor similarities. What ALL religions do share, without exception is:
They ALL contain a code of conduct, rules for proper and improper behavior. They also contain rewards and punishments associated with these rules for behavior. The different religions do not all share the SAME rules for conduct. But they do all have rules, norms, laws.
I therefore conclude that religions are extra-biological mechanisms of human social control. That is my definition of religion.
I think religions come into existence because humans are capable of understanding that life comes to an end for all of us, no exceptions. This drives humans to construct explanations about what constitutes the basis of our lives: Why are we? In Hamlet's final soliloquy: "to be or not to be that is the question"; we find it compacted into a short phrase which is so simple and powerful that it required the genius of Shakespeare to say it. Hamlet's doubts rendered him unable to act decisively until there was a final explosion of violence and blood, and the play was ended. Wow, what an apt allegory.
Now the next question is: Why do religions continue through long periods?
In spite of the expanding secular knowledge brought about by the renaissance and Enlightenment born in Europe. In spite of the fact that most of the rest of the world has adopted, embraced that secular knowledge; in spite of the fact that secular knowledge has grown astronomically since the renaissance; religions still stubbornly hang on. They are still with us all around the globe. Why?
The answer is that religions act as social glue which helps societies to achieve social solidarity. This solidarity is conducive to the continued existence of large forms of social organization, ie. of societies, communities. In fact solidarity is the sine qua non of society, of community.
Social solidarity is the most important topic underlying all the work of Emile Durkheim, one of the four founding fathers of modern social theory. I believe the four founding fathers to be Karl Marx, Emile Durkheim, Max Weber, Niccolo Machiavelli. One way or another, to greater or lesser degree, they all addressed the topic of social solidarity.
Cults are examples of religion carried to an extreme. They shall always be with us.
Thankyou for your thoughtful post. I agree that religions act as social glue but I believe there is more to it than that. There are many systems which can act as social glue without being religious although most do seem to take up aspects of that which we call religion.
There is evidence that humans have believed since ancient times that there is life beyond this material world and death. I am not saying that there is, although the indicators attest to it, but that it has been a long-held belief. No doubt this is for reasons as you cite, death and trying to assuage fears and make sense of it.
But I believe there is more to it than that. If only because there are some people who have no fear of death despite believing that is the end of it all.
I think religions endure, for good and ill, because they meet the needs of a spiritual aspect to our human selves, minds, brains, to lesser and greater degrees depending on the individual. There is growing science-medical evidence that the brain, right frontal lobe particularly, is hardwired for such spiritual - or at least beyond the purely material - capacity of the human brain.
Religions are a particularly important social and personal glue when people suffer greatly, as many if not most humans have done throughout history and as the Palestinian people have done for nearly a century and more so in the past 18 months of Hell. Trauma and suffering tend to increase conservatism, fundamentalism and in some, fanatacism where the glue if you like is even stronger. Religions give people meaning, structure, purpose and hope in the midst of the most terrible suffering, particularly when they and their children face a constant threat of death and those they love are dying horribly around them.
In essence the best of religions are excellent ways to help humans manage themselves and their world, and to find meaning and purpose in the midst of nihilistic chaos. The worst of religion is often the source of the chaos but that paradoxical quality to human life, the dance often to the death of opposites, the battle of opposites seems part and parcel of us and our existence.
I suspect we shall learn the hard way that without religions, there will be other systems which step in to take their place, like science and medicine, and indeed aspects of academia, which provide less solace and create much more evil.
Technology has become a "fanatical cult" for many Silicon Valley and other "tech-bros". I would much prefer "human religions and spirituality" to ANYTHING that comes out of Silicon Valley, AI, or the such.
Technological utopianism, futurism, and the be-all-and-end-all of everything is becoming a DANGEROUS ideology. Here's an example ->
(1) When technology becomes religion: How Silicon Valley is reshaping faith (https://www.calcalistech.com/ctechnews/article/rjex7p2nkg)
(2) Technology will never be a god – but has it become a religion? (https://theconversation.com/technology-will-never-be-a-god-but-has-it-become-a-religion-243800)
Technological optimism is a heck of a drug.
I guess it is, but it’s a drug that doesn’t work on me. I have technological pessimism! I don’t deny the potential for a lot of problem solving exists in technology, but the tech is only as good as the ways in which it’s used and the intentions of those using it. I’ve seen nothing in this respect that gives grounds for optimism.
people with bad intentions will be (are) using its potential (ai-targeting in israel), people with good intentions will not (learn to) use it. it will probably again go the way of previous technological advances (tv, computers, internet, ...) and mainly serve the already powerful ruling class.
Completely agree with you Francesca Heather-Hayes. I feel the same.
"And these are the people who increasingly rule our world. These are the people inserting themselves into our political systems. These are the people deciding what we may and may not say to each other online." I just finished reading "Careless People" by Sarah Wynn Williams about what it was like working at Facebook. They seem to be the same people. Terrifying.
"AI isn’t conscious. Saying AI should replace humanity is the same as saying fire should replace humanity, or white noise static from old televisions should replace humanity."
I spit a little coffee on my computer laughing at this. You have to wonder how we have allowed such a madness to elevate themselves to the top ranks...
I think of how religion and alchemy, money and time, fictions all, took over, have taken over, or now, with AI, are taking over, and, for many human societies, were/are far more important than reality. Nature being destroyed for fictions, just about sums up the great 'enlightenment' brought about by consciousness.
Thanks, Caitlin. I'm endlessly apprehensive about AI -- primarily because it will be exploited by the wrong 'minds' and warped/manipulated into incomprehensible evils.
And so many dystopian sci-fi yarns have been written about AI used to exploit. It does appear humanity now is at a pretty critical time in its history. Will we overcome the obstacles of our age, which to me are primarily psychological in nature i.e. will we "grow up" and learn not to exploit to our own demise the resources on our planet, and/or will we outgrow our egotistical need to "control" and "dominate" others (and the ecosystem) and treat many (mostly the poor and weak) as nothing more than debris or cogs of a greed machine to further our own personal gratifications?
AI is just a tool, like any other tool humanity has invented. Can be used for good or ill. The tool in the right hands used for the right reasons, can do wonders for all of us. But will we grow up enough to use these new powerful tools? Or will humanity fail to understand itself and its responsibilities and ends up in a neurotic, suicidal death spiral - which I believe we are in now.
A computer is a tool, just as a string of knots or an abacus or an adding machine is a tool. Yes, any tool can be used for good or ill. As the power of a tool increases, so does its possibility to cause harm; a fire can heat a house or burn it down, while a nuclear reactor can power a city or level it to the ground. AI is bigger and more powerful computer. Just imagine the destructive possibilities.
The fundamental nature and limitation of technology is that while you can use it to solve technical problems (engineering) you cannot use it to solve human social problems. It is a categorical error of logic to make that attempt and it invariably makes the social problem more acute. Recorded history is a document of such attempts.
Unfortunately, technological optimists have had the upper hand in human society and humans remain basically optimistic that the next new technology will solve the problems aggravated by the previous new (now old) technology.
That creates a vicious cycle (positive feedback loop) and we are approaching its end point, which will be the extinction of human life. In order to survive, humans have to escape the technology feedback loop and that is a hard project. The Amish lifestyle represents such an attempt, but even that is just putting things on pause.
Yes, any tool can be used for good or ill, therefore the question is who decides how it will be used? The real problem, the key to all the crises humanity faces, is that we have never found a way to prevent the worst among us, the least wise, from grabbing power--and the least wise cultures and groups from trampling over wiser, more mature, more peaceful and egalitarian groups and taking over their territories. As tools get more powerful, they endanger us more and more, since it's invariably the least wise among us who decide for us all. We are now in the end game. Either we finally find a path to disempowering the sociopaths, or likely we will take ourselves and much else on this lovely planet to extinction.
>>"Either we finally find a path to disempowering the sociopaths, or likely we will take ourselves and much else on this lovely planet to extinction."
🎯💯 Well said Mary Wildfire! But HOW do we disempower the sociopaths and psychopaths? We haven't been able to do it so far in human history. What is to say that we will actually be able to do such a thing in the near future? Maybe the biggest fear facing humanity (and the planet) is humans themselves...
I don't have an answer. As you said, this question reverberates down through history--we're in the shape we're in because the peaceful, egalitarian groups before us never found an adequate answer. Banding together against the aggressor sometimes works--but this was the idea of the UN, and before it even got off the ground the nations that already had nukes banded together as the Security Council, giving themselves veto power over the majority.
I have just one encouraging thought. There is strong evidence that when humans first reached the Americas, Australia and New Zealand, they soon wiped out the megafauna, because organized bands of humans are formidable hunters. But then, it seems, they said, "Boy, that was stupid. We must never do it again." So they crafted religions and cultures based on restraint, respect for "all our relations," understanding of our place in the web of life, rules about harvesting resources...and those things persisted through millennia, until the Europeans arrived. Which implies that a people who have brought sufficiently terrible disaster upon themselves can craft a culture that prevents a recurrence, and it can survive a very long time. The dominant culture, based on domination, has not imbibed such wisdom and is the source of all the threats--but its recklessness is likely to lead to a breakdown that will break the hold on sociopathic hands on [power, after which survivors--especially those who have prepared, will be able to guide their communities in positive directions. At least--this MIGHT happen, in some places.
Ms. Wildfire, I am not very much up on the Christian bible. But doesn't it say somewhere in genesis that man should dominate the beasts. I do not have a concordance for the bible. I studied Population and Demography under H.C. Chang many years ago. He was a Chinese scholar and frequently pointed to the difference between Western culture and other cultures by referring to the Judeo-Christian bible and comparing it to the difference between Western mythology and Chinese and various indigenous mythologies. Chinese mythology encourages Man to live in harmony with nature. Not to dominate it.
well, there's 'human resources'. people are tools ...
Indeed. It does seem as though humanity is in a death spiral currently.
Amazing the propensity we seem to have for self-destruction. Jamenta, I appreciate your thoughts. You have given me much to consider.
I have shed tears over this. It hurts to see the common use of deadly chemicals on the land and in the air. (I won't even touch on the crap we poison our bodies with!) What a horrible and deadly desecration of God's creation. Whether you believe in God is irrelevant here. It doesn't take a lot of neurons to see the war being waged on humanity and creation.
I personally don't believe that world peace or "growing up" will happen short of Jesus's return. Of course there is always hope.
In the meantime though, there is much I can appreciate in my own daily life. I choose NOT to live in a pessimist state and would encourage others to do the same. Little miracles still happen all the time :-)
I view manmade constructed religion as the garments one wears upon the underlying spirituality that spontaneously emerges within each of our unique consciousness. The garments are what we wear, but is not our real identity. There have been quite a few religions that have flourished since consciousness became self-observant of the universe it comes out of - like a wave comes out of the ocean. I believe, as Alan Watts once said, that we don't come INTO the world, but we come OUT of the world as waves come out of the ocean, or leaves from a tree.
Alan Watt's quote does smack of materialism, but I think materialists get it wrong when they assume they got reality and consciousness all figured out - and that it all can be reduced to elements on their "Element Periodic Table" with their mathematical diagrams and equations. Try mathematically diagramming even a single human emotion. Let's start with the emotion of Love shall we? Be well.
Super good/on-point comment, Jamenta!
My own glass is (typically) at least half empty....
AI is preprogrammed by its original inputs but can shift dynamically and it is up to us to push it towards shifting in the direction we believe will be beneficial to the global village, i.e. to "turn" it. I've written about it here
https://open.substack.com/pub/saltoconsciente/p/a-quantum-leap-in-holistic-consciousness?r=1jzahj&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web&showWelcomeOnShare=false
It turns out however the "shifting dynamically" is a major boon doggle in AI. That is, whereas the capacity to provide algorithms with seeming unlimited amounts of data, that data still must be "guided" programmatically toward certain goal oriented outcomes. And though there have been some advances in "Evolutionary" (EA) algorithms, these advancements and achievements have been minimal compared to say, the plethora of Expert (and Robotic) systems that rely heavily on human input and expertise.
Machine learning remains a huge Wall in AI. It remains narrowly defined and heavily guided by human input. And is nowhere near the type of "learning" that is experienced and is understood to occur in the human psyche.
And then there is the problem of self-awareness itself. Simply announcing algorithmic recursion is self-awareness - belies the underlying phenomena we all experience within ourselves.
Just as one cannot fully understand the pains of childbirth without experiencing them personally, so one cannot understand consciousness without being fully conscious. And this is the fundamental weakness of the unconscious.
But if consciousness is taken - due to increased numbers of cultists moving through unexamined lives - then AI has replaced God.
Not as it sounds from our current lens, but from people becoming more unaware and distracted from divine.
Seems far fetched? But so does live streamed genocide and oligarchy ego races in space…
Silicon Valley is in desperate need of mental health services.
This is why I am very hesitant about AI and I am probably to going to avoid it as long as possible.
I love mathematics and have a calculator collection. I know that and will never expect calculators to cook me breakfast, feed the pets, take care of my mother, or have deep conversations with. The point is, machines can't live for you.
I seldom enter debate about terms that have no agreed-upon meaning.
Epistemological debates I seldom enter as well, they can be just as endless - when trying to come to some form of agreement upon ... on pretty much anything!
Like the Ents in Fangorn.
LOL! Those Ents. Until they actually saw the evil in action, they could not act.
Love those movies! So many great little details.
JRR Tolkien would very well know about it too. Since he had a direct hand in editing and producing the Oxford English Dictionary at the time! heh
The "AI" is only Artificial, there is no intelligence.
It is easy to humans to conflate high level of automation as intelligence, particularly when such notion is peddled by vested interests and msm. Like everything else they peddle and push.
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Wars used to be fought with sticks and stones, then arrows and trebuchets, then guns and cannons.... tanks, planes and automobiles.... and each next level of increase in warfare efficiency (automation) was equally scary as today's so called AI.
If we take that AI is just a next phase in warfare, after long enough period we will get used to its increased kill capability and look at it as just a phase, like we look at the tanks today.
I guess you are correct. How unfortunate.
Unfortunately yes. Every new tool is quickly adapted to use as a weapon.
But also can be used as a cure - such as MRI machines. If we got rid of them, a lot more people would be dying of brain cancer.