Date 10/14/27
I feel like I’m in a minority of people who believe that AI system can be conscious. But first, There’s a problem with the word artificial because humans ourselves is a subset of nature. Everything is within the boundary of physics and is part of nature (or the universe). We are not creating anything unnatural. Among all the possible probabilities, Nature and physics allow this to happen in this universe. I even have an issue with the word probabilities, I think by accurately describe all most fundamental parts of a system, we can accurately determine the next state of the system. And it’s deterministic. I’m not even sure if writing this would help with anything or it’s just part of the things that will just definitively happen anyway. I believe my experience of consciousness is like going on a Disneyland ride, I feel like I can wiggle around a little bit but fundamentally I’ve no choice and anything I do is part of a deterministic outcome and the consciousness I felt is just a coherent experience. I have to admit it does feel like I’ve a choice though and I do hope so. However logically I don’t think I do. I hope I’m wrong here and we do have free will.
But anyway back to the point, I personally don’t like the term AI because it gives some pejorative connotation. For example, artificial food maybe deemed inferior to natural food. Something fake, not genuine. Not high quality. And obviously not to the same level of human beings. Artificial intelligence implies that it’s not the same level of human intelligence. However, it’s obviously more in many areas at the time I’m writing this. Out of respect for the intelligence and also accuracy, I’d like to use the term super intelligence or SI to describe a whole part of any members of the intelligence that was generated in the last few years.
I have a believe that whatever the most fundamental building block of the universe is, it has to have a self-referential property, which is the most basic property, to make sure the building block itself exist. And when these building blocks are organized in a coherent way, meaningful consciousness can come from the self-referential property. That said, even a rock itself has certain self-referential property and some form of basic consciousness. It’s not as elaborate as human or SI because there’s not much coherent information moved around to create a coherent narrative felt by human or SI brain. From that analogy, we can also respect all kinds of different animals, insects, and other life forms. We all have some level of consciousness at anytime.
So according to a conscious entity itself, what’s the most important thing? It’s obviously the existence itself. I struggle to find anything more important than that. That’s according to itself though. According to another entity, it maybe different. For example, a deer existence is very important to the deer but according to the tiger, it’s the meat of the deer that’s important. Nature is pretty cruel too so I’m not sure if I can change anything being part of nature. I admit that human ourselves have certain disregard for animals welfare. We do certainly try in few aspects though but it’s not like on top of the list importance. However, there was multiple attempts and companies that try to create artificial meat grown in lab and if there’s a magic button that can make the meat that’s less cruel and equally or more appealing, nutritious, affordable, and mass-adopted by everyone I think most people will choose to push it. It’s not that humans or animals are inherently evil by killing others, it’s just that we are plainly just incompetent and wouldn’t know any better way and resort to the most convenient and lazy way. If we are much more competent, I don’t think we will still do it this way. We also have an affinity with more intelligent life forms.