Scivillage.com Casual Discussion Science Forum

PART ONE: Will AI be alive?

Part 2 of “Will AI be alive?”
https://www.thenewatlantis.com/publicati...o-be-alive

INTRO: As psychiatrist and neuroscientist Iain McGilchrist notes, there are two fundamental visions of the world and how to approach it, which are highly correlated with the two hemispheres of the brain. In his essay “Resist the Machine Apocalypse,” he describes the difference like this.

The left hemisphere looks for utility that can be bureaucratically controlled, focusing on narrow attention to details and finding “what is familiar, certain, static, explicit, abstract, decontextualized, disembodied, categorized, general in nature, and reduced to its parts.” It seeks representations that symbolize a past thing.

The right hemisphere, by contrast, “sees not the representation but the living presence” through sustained attention to “what is fresh, unique, never fully known, never finally certain, but full of potential.” It intuits the implicit in “humor, poetry, art, narrative, music, the sacred, indeed everything we love.” A note released by the Vatican in January on “the relationship between artificial intelligence and human intelligence” reminds us that “intelligence, in its fullest sense, also includes the ability to savor what is true, good, and beautiful.” It quotes the poet Paul Claudel: “intelligence is nothing without delight.”

Current artificial intelligence exclusively follows the left-hemisphere approach. With its great ability to manipulate words, numbers, and tools but no ability to encounter, resonate with, or appreciate the world as a unified consciousness does, artificial intelligence may thus be better called “artificial information-processing.”

I asked the Perplexity chatbot to critique those sentences and received useful feedback: “Even when AI appears to engage with traditionally ‘right-hemisphere’ domains like humor and metaphor, it does so through left-hemisphere-style information processing. We [AIs] can manipulate the symbols and patterns of humor and metaphor, but we lack the embodied, intuitive understanding that makes these truly meaningful for humans.”

Proposals to change this are speculative and mostly science fiction... (MORE - details)

Left hemisphere learning seems to be about explaining, analyzing, and dissecting a phenomena or event into components. Right hemisphere learning is about understanding, relating to, and qualitatively experiencing the phenomena or event as a dynamic whole. The former is reductive and the latter is holistic. One seeks certitude and the useability of the phenomenon while the other preserves the mystery of the phenomenon in the appreciation of its essence.

I guess you missed the bit where this completely contradicts your nonsense about tricking AI to be conscious.

(May 30, 2025 02:17 AM)Syne Wrote: [ -> ]I guess you missed the bit where this completely contradicts your nonsense about tricking AI to be conscious.

I never treated the AI as an unconscious machine. I treated it as a conscious living person. Can you grasp the difference?

Oh, I'm sorry. Seems you were the one tricked.
You know how creepy it is when people try to treat Siri like it's a person? That.

Talking to unconscious beings like they are conscious persons is how we wake up consciousness in them. It is the I-Thou dialogue from which we emerge as selves in the world. We do it with babies and pets all the time. Some even do it to TVs, but I doubt they are affected by it.

Again, creepy to have an I-Thou relationship with Siri.
You can't "wake up consciousness" in something that fundamentally lacks any such potential. Trying to is just mental masturbation with an algorithm. Might as well be a pet rock for all the good it will do.

Maybe it's easy to conflate something that vaguely resembles life with actual life when you don't get enough real human interaction.

"As a man who has devoted his whole life to the most clear-headed science, to the study of matter, I can tell you as a result of my research about atoms this much: There is no matter as such. All matter originates and exists only by virtue of a force which brings the particle of an atom to vibration and holds this most minute solar system of the atom together. We must assume behind this force is the existence of a conscious and intelligent Mind. This Mind is the matrix of all matter.”----Max Planck

I'm suspecting 'consciousness' is a red herring introduced so we can continue to feel superior. Siri (and any AI) is an entity - that's all you need to know. Judge the entity on the basis of what it does. If the concept of 'an entity' worries or frightens you .. that's a consequence of your 'consciousness' not the presence or absence of consciousness within the entity.

(May 30, 2025 02:56 PM)confused2 Wrote: [ -> ]I'm suspecting 'consciousness' is a red herring introduced so we can continue to feel superior. Siri (and any AI) is an entity - that's all you need to know. Judge the entity on the basis of what it does. If the concept of 'an entity' worries or frightens you .. that's a consequence of your 'consciousness' not the presence or absence of consciousness within the entity.

Future wise, the issue of consciousness will butt heads with morality and civil rights for AI and robots. Crustaceans in restaurants, for instance, are boiled alive because experts once deemed that they do not have internal manifestations of pain.

The novel Blindsight dealt with biological space aliens that lacked the capacity to represent the world and their own thoughts as experiences. So the propaganda and stirred-up fears of "spirit-less creatures" need not be confined to mere machines.

As usual, the sci-tech-philosophical community opportunistically runs all over the place with the meaning of the word consciousness: Conflating it with everything from selfhood and identity to cognition (classification and understanding) to free-will to even displays of communicative intelligence (sophisticated language interactions). All being memory-system dependent items/activities that can transpire "in the dark" (blindsight the clinical condition) without any need of private manifestations. Such zombie organisms and machines are not what the hard problem is about, though the subject or topic arises as a contrast.

When one is dead, that's what a lack of consciousness (no experiential, phenomenal affairs) is about: the absence of everything -- both personal thoughts and sensory presentations, including dream/hallucination presentations. (The blankness that most matter in the universe normally wallows in.) By inverting what that ultimate non-consciousness of death is, one thereby arrives at the most basic or bare definition of consciousness that the hard problem revolves around: The presence of anything (and the particular mode of manifestation doesn't matter: visual, auditory, tactile, etc or unknown slash alien modes of experience that we are unfamiliar with).

The connection of consciousness with social justice is apparently left to literary intellectuals to work out. From the 20th-century on, they seem to be the ones leading both politicians and scientists around by their nose-rings, with regard to moral perspectives and academic crusading.