Footnotes2Plato

“The safest general characterization of the European philosophical tradition is that it consists of a series of footnotes to Plato.”
–Alfred North Whitehead

The Future Impact of Artificial Intelligence

On Wednesday evening (March 13) at Grace Cathedral, was in dialogue with the Rt. Rev. Dr. Marc Handley Andrus, Bishop of the Episcopal Diocese of California; Brian Behlendorf, CTO of Open Wallet Foundation; and Zann Gill, author, former research scientist on collaborative intelligence at NASA, and a founder of Generative AI Lab & Library in an effort to explore the future impact of AI, from three perspectives: technology, the humanities, and religion. Here’s the recording of the event:

Below are some preliminary thoughts, which I originally recorded as an iPhone notewith voice-to-text and then fed into my GPT (Auto Matt) with the following prompt: “turn this transcript into a readable essay. don’t skip any sentences. get as close to verbatim as possible while writing in complete sentences.”

In any discussion about artificial intelligence (AI), it’s vital from the outset to recognize that human consciousness—our thinking, feeling, and willing—is not merely an information processing or computational phenomenon. Consciousness, along with thinking, feeling, and willing, is invisible and undetectable by any device that neuroscientists or physicists might devise. This invisibility highlights a fundamental distinction at the very start of conversations about AI. 

When considering the emergence of conscious AI or genuinely intelligent AI, it’s essential to reflect on the nature of intelligence itself. Intelligence, including human intelligence, may be considered artificial in some respects, as it is augmented by language. Language, even in its oral form, externalizes thought into a physical medium, a process further extended by writing, especially alphabetic writing. Thus, digital forms of artificial intelligence represent the latest evolution of intelligence, which has always been, to some degree, artificial.

However, this discussion aside, the crux of the matter is consciousness. The question shouldn’t be whether machines will become conscious, as they are information processing devices and consciousness transcends such a mechanistic understanding. Instead, we should ask how this new extension of human consciousness into digital technologies will alter our consciousness. How are we being transformed by our interaction with these machines? If we start to believe that a computer could become conscious, we might be inadvertently diminishing our understanding of human beings to that of machines. The challenge, then, is not to anthropomorphize machines but to appreciate the spiritual aspect of human existence that technology cannot capture.

Materialist explanations of consciousness support the illusion that machines could become conscious, at least in principle. This perspective assumes that assembling large language models and video processors could somehow fabricate a thinking, conscious machine. However, this view overlooks the intensive depth of human thinking, feeling, and willing, reducing them to mere information processing, which is a significant oversight.

Understanding the brain already requires more than just considering it as an information processor or a piece of organic matter. To truly grasp its nature, we must consider the brain’s embeddedness within the entire body and its evolutionary history. Our bodies are ecosystems comprising various cells, with only about a tenth containing human DNA. The rest are part of a microbial ecosystem interacting with our human cells. Thus, we are a living society of occasions of experience, to use Whitehead’s terms, rather than a mere assemblage of computationally describable components. The brain cannot be simplistically divided into software and hardware. In the living world (the only world we could ever know), mind and matter are not so easily separated. Instead, they are entangled phases in an unbroken creative process.

Despite the physicalist view of human beings, I will argue that we are essentially spiritual beings. This assertion does not conflict with scientific understandings from neuroscience, physics, or psychology. We can still discuss the soul and spirit without contradicting scientific knowledge. These layers of our being remain invisible to the measurement tools of contemporary science because consciousness itself is the measurer, not just another natural phenomenon. While consciousness is not supernatural, a proper understanding of nature must account for the transcendental status of consciousness and rationality. Science cannot explain consciousness by referring to something outside of consciousness, which would itself be non-conscious. Such an approach misunderstands the very conditions that make science possible in the first place.

Here is the image my GPT created for this transcript:

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3 responses to “The Future Impact of Artificial Intelligence”

  1. Grant Castillou Avatar
    Grant Castillou

    It’s becoming clear that with all the brain and consciousness theories out there, the proof will be in the pudding. By this I mean, can any particular theory be used to create a human adult level conscious machine. My bet is on the late Gerald Edelman’s Extended Theory of Neuronal Group Selection. The lead group in robotics based on this theory is the Neurorobotics Lab at UC at Irvine. Dr. Edelman distinguished between primary consciousness, which came first in evolution, and that humans share with other conscious animals, and higher order consciousness, which came to only humans with the acquisition of language. A machine with only primary consciousness will probably have to come first.

    What I find special about the TNGS is the Darwin series of automata created at the Neurosciences Institute by Dr. Edelman and his colleagues in the 1990’s and 2000’s. These machines perform in the real world, not in a restricted simulated world, and display convincing physical behavior indicative of higher psychological functions necessary for consciousness, such as perceptual categorization, memory, and learning. They are based on realistic models of the parts of the biological brain that the theory claims subserve these functions. The extended TNGS allows for the emergence of consciousness based only on further evolutionary development of the brain areas responsible for these functions, in a parsimonious way. No other research I’ve encountered is anywhere near as convincing.

    I post because on almost every video and article about the brain and consciousness that I encounter, the attitude seems to be that we still know next to nothing about how the brain and consciousness work; that there’s lots of data but no unifying theory. I believe the extended TNGS is that theory. My motivation is to keep that theory in front of the public. And obviously, I consider it the route to a truly conscious machine, primary and higher-order.

    My advice to people who want to create a conscious machine is to seriously ground themselves in the extended TNGS and the Darwin automata first, and proceed from there, by applying to Jeff Krichmar’s lab at UC Irvine, possibly. Dr. Edelman’s roadmap to a conscious machine is at https://arxiv.org/abs/2105.10461

    Reply
    1. Matthew David Segall Avatar
      Matthew David Segall

      Hi Grant,

      Thanks for chiming in. I have no doubt that Dr. Edelman’s TNGS approach may prove fruitful for robotics. I am very doubtful it will lead to the creation of conscious machines, however.

      Physical behavior that mimics conscious organismic agency (including LLM outputs that mimic higher order linguistic consciousness) is one thing. Machines are quite impressive at this sort of thing already. But consciousness just isn’t the sort of thing that can be created by a computer model. The brain and our flow of conscious thinking, feeling, and willing is not an information processing algorithm. Of course there are various ingenious ways of modeling what the brain does in computational terms. But the model is not the reality. I argue we know enough about consciousness already to know for sure that it is not something that can be simulated digitally. Being able to build a machine that simulates human behaviors is not the same thing as being able to recreate consciousness, nor does it suggest much if any understanding of consciousness itself.

      Reply
      1. Grant Castillou Avatar
        Grant Castillou

        I believe the physical world is a valid aspect of reality, but not the only aspect. There are spiritual and other aspects as well, I’m sure. But I can’t deny science’s success at explaining many aspects of the physical world, and the success of its applications. Surgery before anesthesia wasn’t fun. In the same vein, I believe there is a physical aspect to consciousness, because when the brain is physically damaged in certain areas, it consistently produces the same kind of damage to consciousness, e.g. damage to certain occipital areas of the brain produces the same kind of damage to vision in all patients with that kind of brain damage. Science has been good at explaining physical phenomena that are consistent and reproducible. You know which brain theory I support.

What do you think?