Transcript for:
9. Exploring AI and Consciousness Distinctions

Now what about AI, artificial intelligence? I have something to say about this because it's a topic very close to me. I also have a doctorate in computer engineering, computer science, and I did work with AI even when I was at CERN. And back in the day, the theory of AI in the 90s was largely the same as today.

The only difference is that we have faster computers today. So we can do much more. But the theory is still largely the same.

Neuronal networks, back propagation, nonlinear transfer functions, all that good stuff. And already in the 90s, we could build data acquisition systems for physics experiments at CERN. that could identify physics data just as good as a physicist, but much faster.

It could make a decision every 25 nanoseconds. So you could say that the little artificial neural networks we built back then, at least for that class of problem, were as intelligent as a human physicist. So they were intelligent. And I would say, yes, intelligence is a measurable property of a system. You can measure it from the outside.

You can measure how a system responds to environmental challenges and responds to data. So it's objectively measurable and we can build artificial intelligence systems. We are already doing that and I see no a priori reason why we couldn't in the future build a system that is as intelligent as a human for much more classes of problems. Perhaps even all classes of problems that a human comes across.

The problem is that in the community of AI, they conflate, often, intelligence with consciousness. So they think that an artificially intelligent computer is also a conscious computer in the sense of having a private experiential inner life of its own, its own subjective perspective into the world. But these two things are completely different.

Consciousness is not an objectively measurable property from the outside. There is no way to determine whether a computer or a calculator or an abacus has its own conscious point of view into the world. The only way to know it is to be the thing.

The only way to know if a computer is conscious is to be the computer. And this conflation leads to all kinds of absurd implications. You might think that someone like me who says consciousness is the fabric of reality, that the implication then is that computers are conscious, because computers exist, existence is at the foundational level consciousness, so everything is conscious. No, absolutely not.

There is a fundamental difference between the following two statements. Statement number one, everything is in. consciousness and made of consciousness. And statement number two, everything is conscious in and of itself.

To say that everything is in consciousness is different than to say that everything is conscious. When we say that the computer is conscious, what we mean is that it has its own dissociated private inner life. And idealism does not imply that that is the case at all. Under idealism, there are dissociated altars of the universal consciousness. And living beings are examples of those, but not computers.

Well, why? Why to make this difference? Well, for the same reason that I don't think a cup is conscious, or that the floor tiles are conscious, or that this chair is conscious. Nature tells us empirically that we are conscious. We have a private conscious inner life of our own.

I cannot read your thoughts, you cannot read mine. My conscious inner life is private. Now, your behavior is analogous to mine, and you are analogous to mine in structure and medium.

You are a metabolizing, carbon-based, wet, moist, living creature, whose behavior is analogous to mine. So I have very good empirical reasons to think that you too have a private conscious inner life of your own. And I could play this game down to bacteria. My cats look different from me from the outside, but if I zoom in with a microscope, they are identical to me.

They are also carbon-based, warm, moist organisms that metabolize, that do DNA transcription, protein folding, ATP burning, mitosis, all that good stuff that inherits in metabolism. Even an amoeba metabolizes. And even an amoeba or a paramecium, single-celled organisms, have behavior in some way analogous to mine.

Paramecia They go after food and they run from danger. Amoeba construct little houses out of mud particles. And they metabolize.

At the microscopic level, they are very much like me. So I grant them the hypothesis that they too have conscience in their life of their own. But a silicon computer is a completely different thing.

It's not a carbon-based warm moist organism that metabolizes. It's a silicon-based thing that operates according to electric fields and switches that open and close. We have no empirical reason to think that silicon computers too are what dissociative processes in the mind of nature look like. Absolutely no empirical reason to make that jump. It's an entirely arbitrary jump.

And the reason this jump is made in the AI community is the following. AI researchers confuse computation with consciousness. Computation is a concept we created. We invented the notion of computation.

And we invented it in such a way as to abstract from the medium. So an abacus made of wood computes. And a computer, a modern computer made of silicon and running electricity, computes. Because we defined the meaning of the word computation to be independent of the underlying medium.

Anything can compute if it changes states. Your light switch in your living room can have two states. You know, turn the lights on, turn the lights off. You flip it between two states.

That's a computation. Why? Because we defined the concept of computation such that it abstracts away from the medium and focuses only on state changes, on and off. So computation is medium independent by definition.

And then the AI researchers say, well, consciousness too. But no, consciousness is not something we invented. It's not a theoretical abstraction, a theoretical concept.

It's the thing we are before we begin to theorize. It precedes theory. You are not free to just define consciousness the way you want.

I mean, you can do that, but then you are playing your own game in your own private world. Like a ground, a wild potato underground, as the B-52s used to say. Consciousness, the thing most people refer to, is nature's given. It's something that precedes theory.

And it is not medium independent, unless you redefine it arbitrarily and create your own language. We are not at liberty to think of consciousness as independent of the medium. And by consciousness here I mean dissociated private conscious inner life of the type you and I have.

We are not at medium, at liberty to separate that from its medium because nature is telling us it seems to happen only in a certain medium, namely biology, warm moist carbon-based organisms that metabolize. But the AI people conflate computation with consciousness and they think they can give birth. to a privately conscious being made of silicon computers.

Freud used to talk of penis envy, which is the envy women have of men because men have an extra part to their bodies. I like to call this phenomenon in the AI community womb envy because it's the envy men have of the capacity of women to give birth to privately conscious entities. in nature.

So they try to make up for it by conflating computation with consciousness and indulging in entirely arbitrary fantasy. Now let me try to drive home to you why I think this is pure fantasy. I can run a simulation of kidney function in my home computer, a simulation accurate to the molecular level. I can simulate how kidneys work accurately down to the molecular level on my computer at home, does that mean that my computer will urinate on my desk? Of course not, because a simulation is not the same as the thing simulated.

And we all understand that if it comes to pee, or if it comes to anything else. But when it comes to consciousness, because it is such a discombobulating mystery under the arbitrary assumptions of materialism, we don't have that intuition. And we think that if a silicon computer simulates the patterns of information flow in a human brain, then the computer will be conscious. Now, I submit to you this is as absurd as to think that because I simulate kidney function on my computer, my computer will pee on my desk. It's as arbitrary and nonsensical a thought step as the simulation of kidney function.

But people don't see that. I can summarize all this by just saying the following. Analytic idealism does not provide any basis for claims. that silicon computers are conscious. None whatsoever, because what analytic idealism says is that everything is in consciousness, not that everything is conscious.

These are two completely different statements.