No Regrets Journal Essay
Consciousness and Artificial Intelligence Clayton Medeiros May 2021
No Regrets, a journal of poetry, prose and images about the exploration of being and meaning. Clayton Medeiros, Editor, Poet, Photographer, Collage Artist claymedeiros@aol.com Neil McKay (Johnny Trash), Webmaster Submissions are by invitation of the editor Epublishing http://issuu.com/claymedeiros/docs Facebook page No Regrets Journal, haikus, poems and photographs https://www.facebook.com/NoRegretsJournal
As Michael S. Gazzaniga, says, “…consciousness is not a thing. Consciousness is the word we use to describe the subjective feeling of a number of instincts and/or memories playing out in time in an organism…a proxy word, for how a complex living organism operates.” David Chalmers, “How is it that it is possible for something that has experience to arise our of pure matter at all?” We are an amazing creation that layers atoms, molecules and cells to make possible our conscious cognitive and perceptual skills along with our subconscious and preconscious capabilities that manage our bodies and attendant systems that result in you and me. We are organized, complex, robust, self conscious systems that have created the history of humanity. Each individual’s consciousness is embodied and reflects the mental and physical experiences, memories, genetics and epigenetics that can include passing our traumatic and other intense experiences on to our children. We are biologically intricate organized systems that have been designed to be adaptive, evolvable, reliable, and efficient which is analogous to Darwin’s “fitness”. We are living in an ever evolving complex biosphere. Our consciousness interacts with and structures the world around us so that we can make our way through it each day. Consciousness continues to elude science and philosophy. It is greater than the sum of its parts. The underlying physics, chemistry, biology and genetics do not explain consciousness. Our brains are extraordinarily complex with some 100 billion neurons having 100 trillion synaptic connections. Michael Polanyi notes that “it is as meaningless to represent life in terms of physics and chemistry as it would be to interpret a grandfather clock or a Shakespeare sonnet in terms of physics and chemistry; and it is likewise meaningless to represent mind in terms of a machine or a neural model.” j Consciousness and our bodies are intertwined. We live in the world as embodied beings. Our subjective life of images, ideas, presence in the moment, memories, loud noises or surprises can have physical as well as mental manifestations. We can answer many questions about specific parts of the brain influencing particular parts of the body. Yet we have only limited clues about how the brain and the body manifest our integrated subjective consciousness and our ability to be in the environment that surrounds us. Different modules of the brain dominate in different experiences—watching a sunset, hearing a siren, getting pricked by a rose’s thorn or enchanted by the rose’s fragrance. We also can imagine fantasy worlds that become part of our conscious and unconscious experience We tend to believe that intelligence is conscious. Yet much of our intelligence takes place subconsciously or pre-consciously ranging from our breath and heart beat to instinctual reactions to threats and dangers. Recently a dog unexpectedly barked at me. The hair on the back of my neck rose and a shiver ran down my spine. My body,
not my conscious mind, was in charge. Much of our consciousness is embodied and may or may not rise to awareness. Our second brain, the enteric neurosystem, in our gut, controls digestion and related processes. It sends messages to our brain that can change our mood from calm to anxious or fearful. This secondary brain speaks to and alerts the brain before the message is consciously understood. Many messages remain subconscious. We subjectively experience the world and our lives in the moment and over time. We use language to describe the past, the current moment and possible futures. Our consciousness holds and integrates all of these elements. We can share these insights and experiences with one another. Phillip Pullman points out that: “We need to remember we are not ghosts in a machine; we don’t sit in our heads like an astronaught in a command module. We are our bodies. Bodies and mind are one. Or, as William Blake put it, ‘Man has no Body distinct from his Soul; for that called Body is a portion of Soul discerned by the five senses.’ ” Consciousness is a manifestation of our conscious being and our subconscious being integrated with our body. In a sense, we are biologic algorithms, our biographies and evolved bodies are the data. At this time, part of what distinguishes artificial intelligence (AI) from human existence is consciousness, free will, and self awareness. Another element is the human ability to recreate ourselves in future generations of human beings. There are wide ranging views as to whether these characteristics may be in the future of AI or not. It is essential that ethical and value considerations be integrated with the work that is being done in artificial intelligence development. Many current efforts do not consider these issues. For example we need to assure that AI systems are able to document how they have reached their solutions and conclusions. The algorithm must be transparent so that it is accountable. There is also the broader concern of what moral issues should also be considered as the role of AI becomes more ubiquitous in society. Most current AI systems today are weak or narrow AI based on inputs from those managing the systems or from other computers or digital systems. They are good at playing games, picking stocks, driving cars, and making loans, among other tasks. They are tools that analyze huge data sets, make predictions and optimize. But they do not have emotions, common sense or self-awareness. The computer does not know what it does not know. It will optimize its analysis based on what it has been asked to do and what data has been provided to it. In addition to lacking common sense, the computer lacks a sense of humor, humility and imagination. We are currently in the Anthropocene era where human interactions are determining major transformations of the biosphere such as climate change with its many spinoffs in rising oceans, increased catastrophic weather conditions and forest fires. All of these events are documented as human caused with clear forecasts and consequences.
A future AI system that would make recommendations about managing climate change might not accept the current exploitation of the earth and the piecemeal approaches to slowing the rate of change given the incontrovertible evidence for human responsibility for the changes. Some future AI system or robot may have a different interpretation of what constitutes a plan for climate change than its human overseers are considering. The plan would be based on the “best” ecological and scientific thinking. Unless we can see how decisions are reached, we may find that our Ai or robot managers may make decisions that we would neither understand nor support. There are very few opportunities for international approaches to AI to be developed. One of the consequences of increased nationalism is the undermining of world wide organizations like the United Nations and the fragile status of international agreements and cooperation along with the lack of support for the organizations that oversee them. Included among the areas where there is no coordination is AI. AI and machine learning systems will be increasingly unregulated and nationalized. China, for example, already tends to be disconnected from the rest of the world as they develop their own closed systems and ignore international agreements. Among other initiatives, they are aggressively pursuing their own digital currency. China is becoming a high tech autocracy built on a foundation of oligarchy embodied in the Communist Party. Its autocratic society is focused on comprehensive surveillance including each citizen being measured as a “good” patriotic member of society based on the state’s narrow definition. The “good” member definition is also the foundation of their educational system. China is heavily investing in AI and many of its students educated in the United states are returning to China where there is substantial government support and limited regulatory interference with progress since the developers and the state work hand in glove. Google, among other high tech companies, has lost senior managers to China. Hong Kong provides a lens for the current and future approach that China is taking. They have already limited free speech. They have created a new education system for Hong Kong that mirrors the constricted approach to indoctrination in China. The political structure will only make room for patriots as defined by the Communist Party. Surveillance is intrusive and comprehensive Mary Catherine Bateson sees us being in a place where cooperative “complex interactive systems seemed to be falling apart, that a great many efforts towards international cooperation were falling apart; states that involved multiple ethnic systems or dialects were breaking up; and, indeed, societies like the United States, with many ethnic groups and racial groups were having a progressively harder time trying to cooperate.” Populism and nationalism linked to oligarchy are increasingly successful in central and eastern Europe among other countries. Hungary and Poland are examples. Yuval Noah Harari points out that “Humans are masters of cognitive dissonance…” It is manifest in our inability to regulate big tech like Facebook which only operates in its own
interest. It is similarly manifest in our complete failure to respond to climate change in spite of incontrovertible evidence that a climate armageddon is coming. We have already entered the era of integrating AI and machine learning and related capabilities with biological breakthroughs that link software and living matter in the medical world. These initiatives outstrip our ethical understandings. The issues are being wrestled with in breakthrough medical initiatives as they offer assistance to patients who suffer from complex physical and cognitive conditions. The strength of human dominance of the earth has been our ability to self replicate and take group actions. In the future, AI, with human assistance may develop the capability to self replicate and evolve well beyond their current capabilities including the ability of humanity to provide oversight. Human consciousness and the capabilities for group communications are at the heart of human dominance. Our own ethical limits have led us to increasingly disastrous decisions that are destroying the biosphere and its inhabitants including us. AI is becoming a new source of intelligence and group action. The overwhelming role of automated investing on Wall Street is a classic example of machine learning being in charge with very little oversight and no common agreement about ethical or other consequences in the trading world they have established. Corporate greed will stand in the way of requiring algorithms to justify their decisions on Wall Street or in most other venues. The introduction of deep, complex ecological models based on machine learning and algorithms would be unlikely to support our current approaches. The system would chose to protect the biosphere from human predation and move beyond current approaches and re-establish sustainable solutions. Human understanding and communication have a shared foundation about what we hear that places the subject, story, idea or action in a shared context of how the world works and how people and things interact with one another. AI struggles with this at the moment. AI has mastered games like chess and Go. The next step is for neural networks to move beyond pattern recognition and explore organizing principles about the real world like human intelligence does. Future algorithms may learn to see that they need to do something differently and understand whether or not what they did was right. Our brains structure allows us to fill in the gaps caused by the dissonance between the question and the explanatory capabilities of the facts and logic. Reality is messy and our ideas are imperfect. We are moving inexorably to more interactions with machines be they computers or robots. I agree with Miranda Seymour’s review of Eileen Hunt Botting’s Artificial Life After Frankenstein, “If consciousness ushers in suffering (I would add joy), it may well be that the next cyber revolution will prove one of emergent moral choice, and…of
ethical responsibility both to and by the increasingly sophisticated machines that human kind has begun to create.”