The Premise
This is a topic I have been pondering on for a long time and therefore it is important for you, the reader, to understand where I am coming from and why I am making this claim. This article is going to be lengthy and I am not using any AI tool to correct my vocabulary or grammar, so forgive me if I slip up at some places.
The question of consciousness and AI has been a field of study which has interested me since long (maybe since I was in my early teens as far as I can remember and I know there was no AI then, but what troubled me was - how do we know we exist?). And recently I had come across a paper termed as "The abstraction fallacy" when I had the conversation about AI, human brain and consciousness with a friend of mine. Also it just so happens, coincidentally, that we had a dialogue about this same paper and why AI is not conscious or conscious, at an event hosted by this same friend. That also added up to some of the points I am going to put in this article (again, it is going to be very lengthy).
Reading this paper and taking part in the discussion which happened today (i.e. Saturday, the day prior to me publishing this article) made me realize some deeper nuances in the claims made by the author in that paper.
To fully define whether or not AI is conscious, we would have to understand what consciousness means and what a conscious being can or cannot do.
Therefore in this article I shall not delve deep into the consciousness of AI, but keep it limited to consciousness as a whole while referencing to parts of the paper.
The Claim
"Life is a mobius strip" ~ Some guy
This image here, is a mobius strip. It is pretty simple to make, just loop a strip of paper but flip one end before you stick the two ends. This simple piece of craft that anyone can make is also the backbone of my claim today. I say that life is like a mobius strip. Life(time) is a looped dimension, unlike the linear claim most people make. But it is not a simple loop where the end and beginning are connected simply. It is a mobius strip where you start on one side but when you reach the same point after one loop you end up on the other side of the dimension, and you have to loop again to end back at the same point on the same side.
I know it makes no sense to you when you read it and that is alright, because I myself feel like I am going bonkers as I write this article out. But I shall not just claim this and leave it be. I shall also give you my reasoning as to why I believe this is so.
Consciousness Through The Dimension
Forget everything up to this point for a few minutes. I want to ask you, the reader, a fundamental question which has been bugging philosophers all around.
What are you?
Are you the body holding this device?
The brain which is processing this article?
The name which you were given at birth?
I say none of these. And I base my claim vaguely off the philosophy of non duality (Advaita). I say you, I and everyone and everything is just pure consciousness. Matter of fact we are all the manifestation of the same consciousness.
Right. You have already read about this somewhere else.
So, what is the purpose of my article? Where does my theory come in?
I want you to now assume a different perspective for a few minutes as you go into this article.
For my claim I shall assume us (you, me and everyone else) as 3-D entities and I shall here forth call this bunch of 3-D entities as Group-0.
Group-0 has a lot of entities within it (8Bn and more to be precise). From these billions of entities in this group a few of them created a game which most of you might have played or heard of sometime.
Minecraft. It is a simulated reality which we can assume is the closest to our reality.
Minecraft has a bunch of player characters, which can be called as the manifestation of an entity from Group-0 in this simulated universe of Minecraft.
Therefore every character in Minecraft has an entity in Group-0 directly linked to it.
Now I make a claim which you might find absurd but humor me for a minute.
I say these characters in the game are also conscious but they exist in a 2-D world, therefore they are 2-D entities and I shall call them as Group-(-1).
I shall not explain why these are conscious entities in detail but all I am going to say is that I call these as conscious because these entities are being controlled and driven consciously by entities in a dimension above them, i.e. us, the Group-0 entities.
If that is the case we take up here, then how can we know for sure that we ourselves aren't just characters being consciously driven by entities in a dimension above ours?
And mapping out the entity to entity relation from Group-(-1) to Group-0, we can assume that for each entity in the specific group there should be an equivalent or higher number of entities in the group above it.
Also by the logic we have established here there must be 4-D entities driving us who are in turn being driven by 5-D entities and so on infinitely to dimension infinity. And the same happens on the other side where we are driving entities below us in the 2-D world who in turn must be driving entities in the 1-D world and so on to negative infinity dimensions.
For most people this would seem linear and they believe that this just keep stretching on and on. But here is where I claim that at some point, X, negative infinity and infinity dimensions overlap, creating a loop. But at the same point X since the dimensions flip signs, they are not looped in a straight path, rather they are flipped over at the conjecture.
Thus forming a mobius strip of dimensions.
This again leads us back to how does it all fit in to AI?
That is a whole topic on its own which I shall address in some later article (definitely not the next 4-5 articles). But in this before I conclude I shall explain why AI isn't conscious right now.
Everything here on is from the paper I linked above and none of it is my claim or my work. Credits to the author of the paper and the people who worked upon it.
Why AI Is Not Living?
In the paper above the author claims that for something to be conscious it has to be physically driven by a map maker who can map out the signs and give meaning to the signs.
Simply put, there has to be someone physically making the rules and since AI hasn't reached that level yet and can only compute withing the specific bounds it is given, it hasn't reached a level of consciousness yet.
The author claims that consciousness is bound by physical constraints and AI can never be conscious, which I personally don't agree with even though AI is not conscious for now.
The author uses the example of a mechanical heart to a real heart to prove his claim. He says that even though a mechanical heart can replace a biological heart, it cannot function like a real one. It can only work to some extent, almost like a simulation but not the instantiation of the real heart. He also claims AI can only simulate being conscious but can never be conscious.
I shall end my article here, having put forth my views on consciousness and dimensions of entities. I might be wrong or I might be right. There is no one true answer to the question of consciousness. Your view might differ a lot from mine. You could be a believer of the duality school of thought or you could be a nihilist. But all I care about is that I hope this article opened a new perspective to you and maybe you start thinking about this "consciously" rather than believing what you do just because someone said so in some book or podcast.
:)Sayonara