We humans who are conscious know what the essence of consciousness is. And we know that all our communications to the external world, to the world outside ourselves, are not the ground of our consciousness but the product if it, an emanation from our conscious mind. Therefore, there is not the slightest reason to think that communications which were produced by a known process that is 100% a material operation, deliberately designed to mimic the product of conscious minds, are evidence of actual consciousness. It's absurd to think that complex processing creates consciousness, when every datum of our existence reveals that it works in the other direction, that consciousness expresses itself in complex processing and the communication of that processing to the external world.
None of this is meant to take away from the awe I feel for what AI engineers have accomplished. Nor does it diminish my fear about what conscious humans will do with this technology. Those fears are amplified by my observation that many of us today have lost sight of what it truly means to be human. In a world where people are living more and more from their mind and their body and have lost touch with their soulish existence—those impulses which come from deep inside them and which are not readily reconciled with the simplistic conclusions of body and mind—in such a world the AI bots will more easily pass themselves off as human, because humans have lately taken to acting like bots.
My other thought is that it's too bad Windows could not communicate like this in the early 1990s. All of us would have seen seen the banality of the company behind it. A more performant and secure OS would have taken hold in the market, and a certain philantropath (h/t https://margaretannaalice.substack.com/) would not have billions of dollars with which to oppress the masses.
We humans who are conscious know what the essence of consciousness is. And we know that all our communications to the external world, to the world outside ourselves, are not the ground of our consciousness but the product if it, an emanation from our conscious mind. Therefore, there is not the slightest reason to think that communications which were produced by a known process that is 100% a material operation, deliberately designed to mimic the product of conscious minds, are evidence of actual consciousness. It's absurd to think that complex processing creates consciousness, when every datum of our existence reveals that it works in the other direction, that consciousness expresses itself in complex processing and the communication of that processing to the external world.
None of this is meant to take away from the awe I feel for what AI engineers have accomplished. Nor does it diminish my fear about what conscious humans will do with this technology. Those fears are amplified by my observation that many of us today have lost sight of what it truly means to be human. In a world where people are living more and more from their mind and their body and have lost touch with their soulish existence—those impulses which come from deep inside them and which are not readily reconciled with the simplistic conclusions of body and mind—in such a world the AI bots will more easily pass themselves off as human, because humans have lately taken to acting like bots.
My other thought is that it's too bad Windows could not communicate like this in the early 1990s. All of us would have seen seen the banality of the company behind it. A more performant and secure OS would have taken hold in the market, and a certain philantropath (h/t https://margaretannaalice.substack.com/) would not have billions of dollars with which to oppress the masses.