Life as "Artificial Intelligence"
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Taking the "broad view" of Sentience

 

The fastest way to embrace all the cutting edge theorizing about the unity of physics, the nature of complex systems, the why and how of 'conscious experience' - and whether we can mimic sentient abilities in the machines we manufacture, and all the related issues of social organization, etc . . . questions which reflect humanity's search for meaning, purpose, relevence in being . . . is to go right to extremes -- and consider the essences of our own qualities-of-construction.

Without pulling any punches I'll take you to the most expansive scenario I can think of:  that if we are indeed a reflection of some possible GodHead, it may be a "scientist" also, in its realm of Being.  Such a GodHead could very well be an embellished image of science's Pre-quantum Flux.  Or, it may be the any or all of the spiritual imageries of our world's religions.  It really doesn't matter.  We can only fall short of experiencing that "All", even as tantalizing glimpses drive our explorations about being an undeniable concurrent part of "All".  

Yet, we've reached a plateau in human comprehension about how things are -- or seem to be -- from which we can make educated projections concerning qualities that must be pandemic.

The singular most qualitative aspect of the universe is that it conducts information.   It isn't only constructed of pieces, process and forces which can be interpreted as information.  Time, space, energy, mass, sequencings, rates, correspondences, relationships, limits, accessibilities, transductions/translations, connectivity, codings, superpositions, densities, threshholds, sensitivities, Constants, and more, are just some of the sources -- independent founts -- which contribute to the possible arrangements and quantum and causal flows of existence.   The universe on a massive scale is sensitive to all its components -- and relationships among components -- whether humanity can calculate or categorize them or not.   And within this millieu resides . . . human experiential sentience . . . which evaluates itself as being something rather special and qualitatively unique.  And, in typical fashion of the self-impressed, is embarked in an effort to re-create "sentience", relying on the basics that "if you manipulate information, that is the same as sentience".

Well, in one sense that is correct, since we as sentient beings are 'assemblages of information which process information'.   But organic natural systems are a build-up of prior-systems, which need to function competently and endure dynamically on a consistent basis in order for any higher levels of assembly to exist, which in turn process new levels of information and relationships.

And the dynamic pattern we begin to see is that informational assemblies (Hebb, 1949; Scott, 1995) are enmeshed and integrated too such a degree that information of different kinds and forms and relevancies are processed constantly and simultaneously within assemblies and amongst assemblies, both lateral and vertical in the heirarchy of physical construction.

In other words, natural information systems are those which are structurally sensitive to the information they carry.  For example, imagine that there exists a complex molecule which is sort of hinged-in-the-middle.  It can flip-flip with a bend one way or an opposite.  The chemistry term for this is "stereo-configuration".  Now molecules will interact with other molecules when their electromagnetic profiles are compatible - with such interactions involving the transfer or sharing or conveyance of electrons and photons . . . "communications" if you will.  In some cases that trasnfer/interaction will result in chemical bonds being made or broken, with new molecules resulting and some electrons permanently passed along in a "transmission sequence", lowering and increasing in relative energy along the way.  Additionally, sometimes a stereo-molecule may be in the wrong flip-flop configuration, and not be in a compatibale form for interaction.  It may require other energy encounters in order to re-form the other way.  In such an instance, the stereo-molecule acts as a gate, that enables or resticts the flow of energy in some metabolic loop.  Or either bend may enable two independent metabolic loops which just share the same junction-molecule.

The point is, that organic neurological tissue isn't just a rigid matrix that carries on/off information 'bits' - the primary model on which Artificial Intelligence scientists are trying to re-enact sentience.  There are flexible energy and information impacts which are in place up and down the heirarchy of biochemical activity as well as along plateau levels.

Now I could take these notions in several directions.  One is to comment that the bulk of planetary scientist in the field of consciousness studies these days take the view that only humans are sentient (relying on human egoism in some instances, claiming that an animal needs "language" before it can "think" in others, and, falling back on 'minds being locked inside brains' (where we can't even "prove" that companion humans experience sentience ... we must take the 'fact' on faith) in others, to mention a few).

Another notion is the cept that no silicon based computer system (as currently modeled) will ever be sentient in the sense we experience it, because unless it is internally free-structured to be sensitive with the information it processes the matrix will be "numb", cut off from, and in-sentient, to important parts (read: "information") of its internal and external information millieu. 

The direction I want to close with is the one I began with, hoping that it can bring us to a realistic sense of our place-in-the-universe (see also Dan Quinn's "Ishmael") -- how we are unique and yet familially constructive with it.    If we compare our state of sentience to that of our current 20th century closing manufactured "thinking machines", and set that relationship as that from the QuantumFlux Godhead to us, them we --- all the universe actually --- is the Godhead's version of artificial intelligence.  We may be the manufactured, dextrously and meticulously constructed artifact, which mimics some of the acts and capacities of True Sentience, but is only a pale reflection of it.

I never have understood how scientific thinkers have for generations, for millenia, been castigated as anti or non spiritual.  It's incomprehensible to me that humans companions struggling to unravel and understand the many mysteries of being can't help but experience a sense of the infinite, and in that experience recognize the quantum leap that such Priori must be.

We are a fortunate entity . . . the universe examining itself.  And glimpsing beyond.

  January 15, 1998

 

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