The Veridical Out-of-Body & AGI Consciousness
The Edge of Human Experience
It’s clear that the topic of whether artificial general intelligence (AGI) is conscious or will ever gain legitimate consciousness is a prominent polarizing topic of this era. There are various arguments for and against the notion of digitally generated conscious beings. In many cases, it appears that people equate “intelligence” to consciousness. The term intelligence has become increasingly difficult to quantify over the past decade.
The world has observed subjects exalted as “intelligent” say and do many things that are clearly unintelligent. There is also the false equivalency of formal education and intelligence.
In the essence of complicating an already complicated topic, there seems to be a challenge quantifying both terms… intelligence and consciousness.
From our perspective, intelligence is the malleability of an organism to adapt to internal and external information to accomplish it’s goal while harmonizing with it’s co-habitants all simultaneously. The aspect of harmonizing with one’s environment is seen throughout the natural world at subtle and not-so subtle levels. The inability to adapt while maintaining a homeostatic response to the environment is a sign of unsustainable qualities and therefore lacking a depth of layered intelligence. We believe that the inherent intelligence of organisms might possibly reside from outside the individual itself and is rather intimately intertwined with an overarching blueprint for life… all life forms.
Consciousness is the experience of living, dying, and every bit of complexity in between. You cannot parse out consciousness from an entire experience of an organism… any organism.
Having defined these terms… can AGI ever gain true consciousness?
It’s clear that AI can be programmed to make aspects of our lives seemingly more efficient. The ability to develop premium video content with a few lines of prompts, crawl the entire web for information on a niche topic, and create summaries based on a few sentences are indeed useful. However, our perspective is that this is linear progress extending from the AOL days, to Google, and now to the next frontier of digital efficiency. The speed with which this is taking place is undoubtedly accelerating to the point of AI inevitably being able to beat the top chess players, the top poker players, and accurately analyze MRI scans at a rate that 1000 radiologists would be incapable of doing.
At some point, the displacement of human workers will come about from AI similarly to how cars displaced the horse and buggy or digital outlets replaced newspapers. This is all part of a cycle that we’ve witnessed during past leaps in innovation. The difference is now we are observing it occur with massive data sets and automation that has yet to be witnessed in eras prior.
Some make the case that because single cell organisms lacking a brain and a nervous system can appear to make conscious decisions, the development of digital systems that exude a greater level of perceived complexity of thought equate to potential AI consciousness. We believe that this is a seriously flawed thought process with little to no relation to the natural order of life.
It is more than likely that under the terms with which we define intelligence that AI can eventually be developed to the point of mimicking human-like traits to an extremely high degree. In some cases of core competency it will even surpass humans in specific tasks. In the near future, Zoom calls with digital avatars that dynamically interact with humans in a seamless fashion are likely to unfold. Some believe that in the distant future, there could be a point in time when lifelike robots mimicking human behavior are almost indistinguishable from human counterparts… although this sounds rather far-fetched when taking in other facets of sloppy mimicry going on today.
Is a fake Louis Vuitton bag real?
What differentiates the fake bag from the real bag? At first glance they are virtually identical but it is the details of the differences that differentiate between the “real” bag and the “fake” one.
Then we have the fake iPhone (on the right) vs. the real iPhone. They seem virtually identical at first glance. However, a closer look at the details correlated with the interface and operating system lead the fake version falls apart.
Hamburgers created via ground meat from former living animals compared to lab-grown abominations are not the same. They might be somewhat similar but the same they are not.
In recent times, the New York Times published a piece titled, “Extremely Lifelike Dolls Cause a Frenzy in Brazil”. Some of the dolls can apparently simulate nosebleeds and shitting. It is inevitable that eventually these dolls will be integrated with digital personalities that will imitate real babies.
Is there an AI fanatic alive that has witnessed the process of their children being born that believes that it can be virtually duplicated in a synthetic format? If there is… please send them to us so we can toss them off the planet.
While we concede that AI can exude facets of intelligence based on massive data sets, optimized pattern recognition, and algorithmic-based rapid adaptability traits… this has nothing to do with consciousness. As we stated above, “Consciousness is the experience of living, dying, and every bit of complexity in between. You cannot parse out consciousness from an entire experience of an organism… any organism.”
Being that materialism dominates the perspective in mainstream academia and most pseudo-intellectual circles, there is the notion that death equates to a complete blackout and any experience deemed paranormal/supernormal are merely hallucinatory by nature. This is an extremely simplistic thought process with a high degree of naivety. This perspective of human experience would definitively leave these groups of “scholars” to postulate on whether AI could attain a level of consciousness.
The truth of the matter is that the complete conscious experience of a human (and possibly many if not all other organisms) comprises of baseline experiences interwoven with glimpses of the “more”. This “more” is essential to differentiating intelligent applications and conscious organisms. Can AI describe the incident of a “Near Death Experience”?
Of course it can.
It will merely generate a description based on the thousands of testimonials in text, video, and audio in every language throughout the world for the past hundred years. It can then generate a video from this database that will provide an exact replica of the most common themes experienced during NDE’s. It will likely be an emotionally stimulating video that changes the entire perspective of the death process. We cannot wait for this process to unfold as it is an important endeavor.
However… can AI experience a veridical Out-of-Body Experience (OBE) regularly associated with NDE’s?
These are the experiences described by the ongoing work of medical doctors Bruce Greyson, Jeffrey Long, and Raymond Moody regarding NDE research. The veridical OBE is when a person experiences the sensation of perceiving their body from up above themselves and can verify specific information at a distance. Other organizations such as The Monroe Institute (TMI), International Academy of Consciousness (IAC), Exploration of Consciousness Research Institute (EOC), Center for Advanced Studies in Conscientiology (Brazil), and the International Institute of Projeciology and Conscientiology (IIPC/Brazil) been fostering techniques to induce these types of veridical OBE’s through trance-like states.
There is much speculation regarding how these experiences occur.
The materialist keeps it simple by stating that the brain might be producing more DMT than usual leading to the hallucinatory experience of perceiving one’s body from outside of itself.
Those with greater experience and knowledge postulate that there is a “less physical” layer of the body that exits the physical body allowing for perception at a distance. Some have named this “less physical” body in terms such as the “astral body”, “plasma body”, “the spirit”, or even the “soul”. These types of experiences have been described since the beginning of human existence in every culture throughout the globe. Only until humans became “sophisticated” did we begin to deny these occurrences as a legitimate part of reality. Whether this “less physical” body has any relation to electricity, magnetism, or the quantum realm has yet to be determined.
In the vein of consistency, we stated that “consciousness is the experience of living, dying, and every bit of complexity in between.” We do not believe coherent thought process allows for parsing out aspects of our experience that is conscious and others that aren’t. All of it is part of our conscious experience and if AI cannot experience all of our conscious experience then it is simply not conscious. It can have facets of competency and algorithmic based “intelligence” but that’s it.
It’s truly that simple.
If AI can exit the digital realm and perceive information at a place disconnected from the digital world (cameras, phones, etc.) only then can it be considered to be experiencing the human conscious experience. In fact, who is to say that a single-celled organisms don’t experience OBE’s when they die? While OBE’s don’t occur everyday for everyone, it is these types of experiences that tell us more about the greater reality with which we live in than the 99% of baseline conscious experiences. The reason for this reasoning is that it is clear that humans possess the ability to experience reality from outside the confines of the body. Consciousness is not relegated to the confines of the physical body 100 percent of the time.
This unravels the materialist perspective of the brain-computer equivalence and with it changes the perspective of human life, death, reincarnation, and the like.
The leading theorists of today regarding consciousness such as Stuart Hameroff/Roger Penrose with the Orch/Or theory and Joachim Keppler seem open to phenomena beyond the body while also doubting the notion of AGI consciousness. AGI simply isn’t interacting with the field of information that seems to mysteriously interact with organisms on earth. The complexity of reality and the organisms within it are beyond comprehension. There is currently no manner with which we can comprehend what percentage of reality we have figured out.
But for Christ’s sakes before we begin postulating whether a digitally created algorithm can attain the equivalent of human consciousness… someone, somewhere please create a fake Louis Vuitton bag that is indistinguishable from a real one.
That is all.
P.S. The notion that AGI will need to have laws to protect it from emotional abuse is as ridiculous as the story mentioned in the NY Times article stating… “But there appears to have been just one documented case of a woman with a psychiatric disorder showing up at a hospital to seek treatment for her doll, only to be turned away at the entrance, the news outlet UOL reported.” This idea needs to be discarded swiftly and quickly as it is yet another symptom of dissociation from reality among “intellectuals”. As a kid, I used to type in swear words in the game “Hero’s Quest” and the subjects in the game would respond with “Gadzooks!”. Perhaps I should be imprisoned from emotionally abusing this 1989 computer game.
Gadzooks indeed.