Artificial Intelligence vs (Synthetic) Consciousness

AUTHOR:Grey Lindley | DATE: 05 Nov, 2009 | CATEGORY:AI and RoboticsFuture StudiesNew Thought

I'm not "intelligent", thanks

How did the AI movement make the radical assumption that the "intelligence" bit in the term of "Artificial Intelligence" (I'm referring to strong AI here which is meant to replicate human "intelligence") actually describes the entirety of the human being? From wikipedia I found this definition of (strong) AI: "The field was founded on the claim that a central property of humans, intelligence - the sapience of Homo sapiens - can be so precisely described that it can be simulated by a machine."

"Central property of humans"? I don't feel "intelligence" comes even vaguely close to being an appropriate definition of the experience of being human, of this experience of being the me I've been all my life, or any other "central property". It's an incredibly glib term for the totality of one's humanity that conveniently reduces us into something that could conceptually be recreated as a robot. I think with any such discussions we initially should take the step of using a more apt description to get us in the right ballpark, for example "Human Consciousness". Then it seems we are approaching our humanity more correctly for what it is. Subsequently we can talk about replicating it with terms such as "Artificial Human Consciousness" or the better sounding "Synthetic (Human) Consciousness".

As soon as we do that, things suddenly become a whole lot more complicated. Why? Simply because the scientific world is having a huge problem in dealing with the whole phenomenon of consciousness. For a number of years now, Australian Philosopher David Chalmers has been highlighting this "hard problem of consciousness", which is essentially the very unanswered question "How is the experience of subjectivity generated?', and "hard" because it can never be approached by empirical methods. He suggests that consciousness is a fundamentally a different property of the universe that isn't based on matter. (He calls it Panprotopsychism. I'm still amazed he's got away with this with so little trouble!)*

The current and prevailing paradigm that mainstream science is sticking to is that consciousness must be generated by the matter in the brain. There's signifigant data to suggest so, though many are not convinced it's as simple as that. If this experience of individuated subjective consciousness that you and I are having right now and have had our entire lives is really actually generated by a bunch of electrons, atoms and molecules in the form of neurons, etc. it's entirely possible that we really don't understand Matter at all - which at this point would be terribly embarrassing!

Either way, as it stands the scientific world really doesn't have a handle on consciousness, and it doesn't seem that things are going well. Personally I don't think science as we know it will survive this particular adventure intact!

Here's a video of the leader of the Singularity movement himself, Ray Kurzweil - in a stunningly glib aside - acknowledging this "hard problem" (at 25:00 mins in): http://www.thoughtware.tv/videos/watch/4536-The-Ubiquity-And-Predictability-Of-The-Exponential-Growth-Of-Information-Technology

[QUOTED FROM THE VIDEO]
"Chalmer's hard problem is really an impossible problem from a scientific [perspective]...because of this conceptual gap between objective reality and subjective experience which is very much a first person experience, which only concludes that there's still a role for philosophy..it very quickly gets very mysterious"
- Ray Kurzweil, Singularity Summit, 2009

Stages of Consciousness

Despite this, it's stunning to see Ray Kurzweil has no problem continuing to announce the coming Singularity. He claims computers will reach the processing power of the human brain by somewhere between 2030-2060, at which point there will be an explosion of "artificial intelligence" and human history as we know it will be over - like a technological version of a well organised Biblical armaggedon - except the good people don't go to heaven, they get digitised - or maybe just blown away by their new robot masters.

Hmmmmmmm. Really? Thing is - we have had the processing power of the human brain for around about the last 100,000 years. One of the things we very do know about human consciousness - the actual sapience of Homo sapiens - is that it has evolved over a very very very long period of time.

I think this is a fascinating way of looking at our history. It is the history of the evolution of self-reflective consciousness. I outlined this in a previous article called an introduction to Stages of Consciousness, which is a perspective that has been stumbled upon by numerous academics across a range of fields. Essentially we have created and moved through at least 5 to 6 major stages of consciousness and culture over the last 100,000 years. In terms of this discussion, the most important thing I can say on this is that it seems our subjective experience - that of this "hard problem", develops greater and greater depth in each of these stages.

In summary:
100,000ya Survival
50-35,000ya Tribal
~10,000ya Warrior/Barbarian
~3000ya Mythic/Absolutistic
450ya Scientific/rational
150ya Pluralistic/Integrative

Each of these stages has carried distinctly new capacities for cognition, moral and value formation, relationships and subsequent political/religious and social systems and cultural artifacts. As we grapple with new global issues in the 21st century, these stages are still emerging as we speak. We are always in the midst of and contributors to this evolution of culture and consciousness.

Meanwhile, work by Piaget, Kohlberg, Kegan and most prominently Ken Wilber's sythesis of these theories in his in books (e.g Theory of Everything) strongly indicate that an individual moves through very similar stages of capacity for cognition, moral and value formation, etc. For example, it seems an individual moves through Stages 1-4 (which as a species has taken us about 100,000 years to move through) in just 16 years. How is that possible? To the best of my knowledge we don't know. It's really not clear how this happens to the extent that Wilber (in 1995) suggested that Rupert Sheldrake's theories of morphic resonance may explain this capacity!

And it's more It's more complicated than that. For example: the emergence of tribalism in human culture was very probably a very pragmatic, needed adaptive response to population pressures, developing capacities for cognition and socialisation and need to regionalise culture to allow it to develop and use local ecosystems more intensively alongside what seemed to be an explosion in the human capacity for imagination and art. Not to mention - in the process of this stage evolution - the dissonance between an earlier stage and the emergent stage is in itself part of the formation of a complex multi layered meshwork or ecosytem of cultural stages all interacting with each other with large georgraphies/populations over extended periods of time.

It is quite possible that in the end, Kurzweils armaggedon could well end up being something akin to tribes of mini swarmbots painting themselves and building digi-henges for long dead swarmbot ancestors for a very very long time. I've found a great place for that experiment.

One Talking Toaster, Please

This is one angle on what seems to be a larger issue - the true complexities of what make up human consciousness are not seriously on the radar screen of the strong AI movement. Have no doubt, Kurzweil's predictions about the exponential nature of technological development are exceptional and he is the authority in this field. It seems to me there is a problem here, in that the AI movement though it's inaccurate and shallow assumptions of who we are and how we are made up, actually believes a total understanding of the human being can actually be achieved by a technical revolution of brain slicing, neuron mapping and computer processing speeds!

The unanswered questions here are not only technological or scientific (as is currently defined) - they are also anthropological, psychological, philosophical and spiritual - and it is going to be a simultaneous and extreme developments in all these fields that will generate essential understandings of our humanity that may allow something akin to Synthetic Consciousness to eventually be developed. In this context, the current state of the "AI" field seems to be similar to the alchemists of antiquity, who really believed that they could make gold out of lead.

Meanwhile, I think I'm up for a more metropolitan version of the singularity along the lines of talking toasters and sliding doors that have suggestions for lunch.

*His approaches have a close correlation with the philosophy of Ken Wilber and Aflred North Whitehead who both suggest that as complexity evolves, so does the interior of said entity. With increasing depth there is increasing consciousness, as a separate property to matter.