How Artificial Intelligence Can Help Us Become Truly Conscious
More or less, everything can be automated. We don't need language to describe left or right, right or wrong - the code can do that. Automated activities, efficient AIs, they will bring about great freedom of thought. We will no longer have to use language to describe mundane tasks - we will trust or robots, or our tech. The language will be free and we will be able to use it as an art tool. It will become a relic of a kind, able to develop in a way that allows for more abstract thought, and maybe some age-old philosophical questions will be resolved.
Huxley said:
This is the greatest gift which man has ever received or given himself, the gift of language. But we have to remember that although language is absolutely essential to us, it can also be absolutely fatal because we use it wrongly. If we analyze our processes of living, we find that, I imagine, at least 50 percent of our life is spent in the universe of language. We are like icebergs, floating in a sea of immediate experience but projecting into the air of language. Icebergs are about four-fifths under water and one-fifth above. But, I would say, we are considerably more than that above. I should say, we are the best part of 50 percent — and, I suspect, some people are about 80 percent above in the world of language. They virtually never have a direct experience; they live entirely in terms of concepts.
But if robots and intelligent algorithms take over most of our activities, the time we spend in language could be constructively used, because we will finally become aware that what we talk about is not the reality that surrounds us - the language will become free of meaning, and it will become a beautiful game.
We talk about AIs becoming conscious, but we ourselves haven't really reached full consciousness, nor do we know what it is. We talk about AIs becoming self-aware, but how self-aware are we actually? Very little. Perhaps, what AIs will do, is free up our space and time enough so that we have conditions to become fully conscious and aware. Once survival is no longer an issue and most of our tasks are automated, we may become free to truly explore our minds, through art, drugs, meditation, sex and companionship that are not based in interest. So maybe the goal is not to make robots self-aware, maybe the goal
is to make the robots so efficient that they can help us become truly liberated through full consciousness.
Huxley also said, this is one of my favorite thoughts:
In general, we think that the pointing finger — the word — is the thing we point at… In reality, words are simply the signs of things. But many people treat things as though they were the signs and illustrations of words. When they see a thing, they immediately think of it as just being an illustration of a verbal category, which is absolutely fatal because this is not the case.
And Victor Pelevin writes in Batman Apollo:
All languages, despite their apparent differences, are just different versions of the same code. And the code is written so that the computer always gets stuck. You understand? The nature of their thinking inevitably suggests an inaccurate and awkward image of the world, that ties one's hands and legs since childhood. One does not need a dark forest in order to get lost - two nouns will suffice. For instance, "subject" and "object". The more people fight about words, the more they sink into living mud of their own making.
We lose so much time in misunderstandings, bad communication, arguing about words and not things those words represent, getting lost in what was said instead of what we feel. This is the reason I was so fascinated with computer languages, and why I started learning how machines talk - it's so fucking simple, in terms of sign=meaning. It's either this or that. I think humans can learn so much about communication from intelligent machines, and in this way, we will free up so much of our time. Our spiritual development would become very fast, and we would reach higher levels of consciousness that are currently lost on us, because we waste time in meaningless patterns of bad thinking and bad communication. Beware of infinite loops, as they say.
Anyway, just some food for thought! :) What do you think?
photo src: https://society6.com/?curator=pokingsmot