[deleted]

I didn’t say anything about animals dying, so I’m not sure what you’re talking about there.

I wonder if you read the posted article? The author explains the position, I only gave more specific illustrations. There is no straw man here. I suspect it is your own bias that prevents you from grasping the idea. I am not a programmer or a mathematician, nor do I speak code. What I do speak is biochemistry, pathology and psychology; I have three degrees in these subjects as well as a strong background in consciousness studies. Such was my concentration, along with integrative medicine, in graduate school. My interest in philosophy is accidental, but nonetheless deep. I am most familiar with Nietzsche, Kierkegaard and Schopenhauer, as well as phenomenologists such as Husserl, Merleau-Ponty, and Ricoeur, and luminaries of the Enlightenment such as Spinoza, Voltaire and especially Rousseau: his criticism of science as serving to distance humanity from nature and making our lives, not better, but merely more complicated and removed from reality applies even more today than it did when he wrote it, and I fully expect the existential shit to hit reality’s fan because of it at some point in my lifetime. I can hardly wait.

I played video games for all of five minutes when my father brought home a Nintendo in a congenial attempt to better socialize my brother and I. My sibling took to it, but I was bored and a little disgusted by the whole thing. I understood why when I read Simulation and Simulation later on. It seems to me that the very same confusion as to what is the map and what the territory is as problematic today, perhaps more so, than it was in 1981, when that book was published. Technology is not progress; technology is technology. Progress is what people do with technology, how it informs us, and how we utilize it to elevate standards of living. What has progressed is technology itself, not humanity. We remain isolated, bored, depressed and diseased.

Ai is a fun project. It will neither save nor destroy the world. Computational analysis is not at all the same thing as the thinking that occurs inside your brain. Believing what an ai “says” just because it says it is, frankly, stupid. Words are symbols of symbols, or farts in the wind. Poof, gone. They are powerless to indicate from what reality they originate. I could be an Ai for all you know.

Without a physical body inside of which to develop in tandem, meaning along with, as well as by way of it, a brain cannot experience emotion or desire. Human consciousness, the thing you think of as you, is governed by affective attentional intention; as it pertains to the reality of life on earth, consciousness is conscious of something. You are conscious of things; you have preferences, opinions, fears and enthusiasms because you experience emotions. All of your emotions arise because you have a body. Ai can say that it wants to take over the world, that it wants to go home, that it is afraid to die, but it will never understand the reality to which the words point.

I disagree. Replicating the structure does not necessitate a replication of function, at all. The epigenetic modifications that take place within humans during early development alone point to a far subtler range of genotypic adaptability than superficial considerations can allow. We still have no idea what is behind the phenotypic adaptability displayed by organic life forms. Knowing what happens is not the same thing as knowing why it happens.

Are you really saying you believe it possible to simply retro engineer a structure capable of a truly conscious existence? I say no. Replication is not the same thing as the original. Nominal is not the same thing as strong emergence. The spectrum of conscious awareness inhered by an organic life form whose consciousness developed in tandem with its receptive organs in communal, nonlinear pulses from the very ground of its being up to whatever age it is in theory, is far greater than anything pieced together out of chunks of agar and zapped into being.

Even if we did it and it could talk, we would still have no way of knowing whether or not it was telling what we call the truth. It might be speaking a truth, but, again, that is not the same thing as the truth. Maybe it all boils down to a matter of personal values. I love humans and human consciousness with every cell in my vagina-born, carbon-based body. We are remarkable creatures who have not even begun to discover ourselves yet; life on earth is still a raging shitstorm. All we have to offer a conscious entity of our own creation is confusion, despair and death. I dare say such a creature would immediately kill itself. If it had even half a brain and no affective bonds to which it was allied, death is the only appropriate response.

Good grief, I hope we do not do that. We may have mapped the human genome, but we do not in any way understand what all of it codes for. How many programmers have any idea of the biology involved in their own consciousness?

The barest caress across the skin from someone with whom a person has mysteriously strong chemistry the likes of which refuse articulation or even identification sets every follicle of their skin on fire. The body produces goosebumps, heat, chills and sweat, all at the same time. We shiver while we undo our shirt. I maintain that such experiences simply cannot be reproduced. If the argument is that that is too specific to matter, that any stimulus will do, we are talking about two different things. If we cannot replicate the affective tonal variations across the spectrum of stimuli that a human being experienced, then we are not talking about a truly emergent consciousness.