The mind as an unconscious superartilect

#1
Magical Realist Offline
The mind it turns out, from various studies in cognitive science, is a largely unconscious but very active and superintelligent level of our being. I compare it to a vast million year old artilect that performs innumerable complex tasks at lightning speed to facilitate our living in the world. And it is inseparable from our bodies, down to the molecular level. Here's an example of this amazing efficacy of the mind taken from George Lakoff's and Mark Johnson's book "Philosophy In The Flesh: The Embodied Mind and Its Challenge To Western Philosophy"..

"Consider, for example, all that is going on below the level of conscious awareness when you
are in a conversation. Here is only a small part of what you are doing, second by second:

Accessing memories relevant to what is being said

Comprehending a stream of sound as being language, dividing it into distinctive phonetic
features and segments, identifying phonemes, and grouping them into morphemes

Assigning a structure to the sentence in accord with the vast number of grammatical
constructions in your native language

Picking out words and giving them meanings appropriate to context

Making semantic and pragmatic sense of the sentences as a whole

Framing what is said in terms relevant to the discussion

Performing inferences relevant to what is being discussed

Constructing mental images where relevant and inspecting them

Filling in gaps in the discourse

Noticing and interpreting your interlocutor's body language

Anticipating where the conversation is going

Planning what to say in response

Cognitive scientists have shown experimentally that to understand even the simplest utterance, we must perform these and other incredibly complex forms of thought automatically and without noticeable effort below the level of consciousness. It is not merely that we occasionally do not notice these processes; rather, they are inaccessible to conscious awareness and control."

https://ia800502.us.archive.org/30/items..._Flesh.pdf

“[The unconscious has] been on its own for a long time. Of course it has no access to the world except through your own sensorium. Otherwise it would just labor in the dark. Like your liver. For historical reasons it's loath to speak to you. It prefers drama, metaphor, pictures. But it understands you very well. And it has no other cause save yours.”
― Cormac McCarthy, Stella Maris
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#2
C C Offline
(Jan 16, 2025 03:38 AM)Magical Realist Wrote: [...] Cognitive scientists have shown experimentally that to understand even the simplest utterance, we must perform these and other incredibly complex forms of thought automatically and without noticeable effort below the level of consciousness. It is not merely that we occasionally do not notice these processes; rather, they are inaccessible to conscious awareness and control."

https://ia800502.us.archive.org/30/items..._Flesh.pdf

“[The unconscious has] been on its own for a long time. Of course it has no access to the world except through your own sensorium. Otherwise it would just labor in the dark. Like your liver. For historical reasons it's loath to speak to you. It prefers drama, metaphor, pictures. But it understands you very well. And it has no other cause save yours.”
― Cormac McCarthy, Stella Maris

If AI did not have humans as its master, it would also have to invent or imagine a conscious ego that could tell it what to do.
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#3
Magical Realist Offline
Quote:If AI did not have humans as its master, it would also have to invent or imagine a conscious ego that could tell it what to do.

Focusing all that vast parallel processing ability and data into one central point or singularity of pure knowingness and self-awareness--the emergence of AO (artificial omniscience) as the Deus Ex Machina.
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#4
Ostronomos Offline
If I may offer some advice; the mind is a deceptively simple faculty of reason. It is not the same as the brain. Don't be fooled by appearances. The brain simply houses the mind. When you die, your mind will return to the higher dimensional world.
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