I understand reflexive consciousness as the capacity to identify thoughts and intentions as belonging to a temporally continuous, singular identity, and to be able to have thoughts and realise intentions with respect to that identity, including its thoughts and intentions.
There is a commonality between how insects or birds recognise other members of the same species and how humans recognise other humans. It would not suffice to rely on sight or smell to identify our kind without already knowing what to look for. It is this additional knowledge that cannot be discovered but is intrinsic to the species. In the case of animals, attraction to same species is unconsciously embodied, as a common sense; consciousness of the common kind emerges from this common sense. Nevertheless, this interpretation is also retroactive: consciousness creates the meaning of the conditions that gave rise to it.
Without limit, always, because time is a property of reflexive consciousness, and without reflexive consciousness there is no time. When we speak of the beginning of the universe, or the timeline of evolution, we are doing so from the position of reflexive consciousness, and we extrapolate the explanatory conditions we take for granted, but at some point in the analysis the commitment to materialism that biological evolution and physical cosmology entail are bound to result in a contradiction.
What do you think about the beginning of John, which rewrites creation as "In the beginning was the Word"? How much of the structure of the universe do you think they understood at that point?
Logos as the structure of sense is also the fundamental structure of consciousness, of all meaning (therefore all being), and therefore of agency, of conscious creation. If “the beginning” can be interpreted as the foundation (of being and time) then Logos is the key to interpreting the Bible.
I don’t know that a newborn human possesses any parental memory either, and “evolutionary roots of common embodiment” seems, shall I say, fanciful. I did look it up:
“Within cognitive psychology, it is used to suggest that features of the physical body play an important causal role in cognitive processing.”
What it further suggests is there was never a beginning to awareness until some time after humans (not necessarily homo sapiens) existed.
I would easily agree that as machine “thinking” would not be very similar to thought processes of biological individuals, their world would necessarily be different. I’ll read your included link, but I can’t imagine for what reason it would not exist, to us.
Genetic information is of itself ‘parental memory’, encoding the offspring with a limited record of human evolution but in continuity with the evolutionary origins of consciousness. When I refer to evolutionary roots of common embodiment i do not mean just the phenomenological or functional aspects of being in a particularly configured body, but the structures of meaning that evolved through and with the body over countless generations. Every meaning we now possess is rooted in some older, simpler meaning-forms, a kind of world-etymology, and if those root meanings were absent, not already expressed in our common sense of reality, then the present meanings could not be grasped. This sense is partly encoded in our bodies and party systemic, perhaps literally ‘the world we are in’. Consider a dictionary. Every word is defined in terms of other words, so it is logically circular, by itself meaningless, and something extra/external to the word-definitions is needed to decode it, to grasp the intended sense. This extra something is our common experience of reality, sensory coherence, which provides us with the root meanings that make the whole abstraction of language meaningful. Without those common roots there is nothing in common, no language, no meaning. AI does not possess this key, which is in the depths of the past, and ‘this world’ does not exist without it.
I haven’t stopped reading since your reply. The biophotonics statement can’t be presented as a valid piece of evidence because it is not understood, just as human thought processes are not.
I do have a further question, and I feel sure you will have an answer.
While it seems clear your thinking fundamentally excludes non-biological information processing as capable of emulating thought (not just responses), what would you say about two separate AI entities equipped with machine vision and tactile and olfactory sensors, that might “socialize” one with the other through information exchange? Would that, in your mind, change the likelihood of achieving self-awareness by a machine?
I note that Stephen Hawking seemed to think it would happen.
But I do not think even this is possible, because the process would be embedded in human reality, in our world, in our meaning, but missing its evolutionary roots of common embodiment.
While I enjoy grappling with this I have not succeeded in satisfying myself that this is actually correct. I think language is in the way, and this page is illustrative:
A newborn child is an extension of its parents, it contains some of their memory and may also be an extension of their ‘sense’ of common consciousness by the time it is born. Moreover, the world itself is an extension of humanity and of common consciousness, so the consciousness of a child could be predetermined by these conditions. I suggested previously that if an embryo were grown in a lab and completely isolated from all human contact all its life, it would not develop reflexive consciousness, but this is not quite right. ‘Complete isolation’ would require having no human parents, having no contact with humans even on non-local subatomic level (coherence) or by means of human biophoton emissions that traverse the Earth, not experiencing the human world at all, just floating in empty, cosmic darkness, and deprived of human senses. This is impossible, so a newborn is already an extension of human consciousness and bound to be conscious even in social isolation, although there is plenty of evidence that its conscious development would therefore suffer, and its integration in the human world would be negatively affected.
As for the formal model that precludes monadic self-reference and permits only indirect, socially mediated self-reference, this is based on an a priori proof, so unlikely to be wrong unless the math is wrong. It is simple math.
There is a commonality between how insects or birds recognise other members of the same species and how humans recognise other humans. It would not suffice to rely on sight or smell to identify our kind without already knowing what to look for. It is this additional knowledge that cannot be discovered but is intrinsic to the species. In the case of animals, attraction to same species is unconsciously embodied, as a common sense; consciousness of the common kind emerges from this common sense. Nevertheless, this interpretation is also retroactive: consciousness creates the meaning of the conditions that gave rise to it.
How far down the evolutionary tree do you think reflexive consciousness goes?
Without limit, always, because time is a property of reflexive consciousness, and without reflexive consciousness there is no time. When we speak of the beginning of the universe, or the timeline of evolution, we are doing so from the position of reflexive consciousness, and we extrapolate the explanatory conditions we take for granted, but at some point in the analysis the commitment to materialism that biological evolution and physical cosmology entail are bound to result in a contradiction.
What do you think about the beginning of John, which rewrites creation as "In the beginning was the Word"? How much of the structure of the universe do you think they understood at that point?
Logos as the structure of sense is also the fundamental structure of consciousness, of all meaning (therefore all being), and therefore of agency, of conscious creation. If “the beginning” can be interpreted as the foundation (of being and time) then Logos is the key to interpreting the Bible.
I don’t know that a newborn human possesses any parental memory either, and “evolutionary roots of common embodiment” seems, shall I say, fanciful. I did look it up:
“Within cognitive psychology, it is used to suggest that features of the physical body play an important causal role in cognitive processing.”
https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-3-030-78471-3_24
What it further suggests is there was never a beginning to awareness until some time after humans (not necessarily homo sapiens) existed.
I would easily agree that as machine “thinking” would not be very similar to thought processes of biological individuals, their world would necessarily be different. I’ll read your included link, but I can’t imagine for what reason it would not exist, to us.
Genetic information is of itself ‘parental memory’, encoding the offspring with a limited record of human evolution but in continuity with the evolutionary origins of consciousness. When I refer to evolutionary roots of common embodiment i do not mean just the phenomenological or functional aspects of being in a particularly configured body, but the structures of meaning that evolved through and with the body over countless generations. Every meaning we now possess is rooted in some older, simpler meaning-forms, a kind of world-etymology, and if those root meanings were absent, not already expressed in our common sense of reality, then the present meanings could not be grasped. This sense is partly encoded in our bodies and party systemic, perhaps literally ‘the world we are in’. Consider a dictionary. Every word is defined in terms of other words, so it is logically circular, by itself meaningless, and something extra/external to the word-definitions is needed to decode it, to grasp the intended sense. This extra something is our common experience of reality, sensory coherence, which provides us with the root meanings that make the whole abstraction of language meaningful. Without those common roots there is nothing in common, no language, no meaning. AI does not possess this key, which is in the depths of the past, and ‘this world’ does not exist without it.
I’d read it. I’ll do so again.
I haven’t stopped reading since your reply. The biophotonics statement can’t be presented as a valid piece of evidence because it is not understood, just as human thought processes are not.
I do have a further question, and I feel sure you will have an answer.
While it seems clear your thinking fundamentally excludes non-biological information processing as capable of emulating thought (not just responses), what would you say about two separate AI entities equipped with machine vision and tactile and olfactory sensors, that might “socialize” one with the other through information exchange? Would that, in your mind, change the likelihood of achieving self-awareness by a machine?
I note that Stephen Hawking seemed to think it would happen.
I am not presenting biophotons as evidence, only a hypothesis, based on scattered evidence of their emissions and extra-personal effects.
https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/About-the-Coherence-of-Biophotons-Popp/e26d2bade9ccabf441a081fc21163fba5663347b
https://www.academia.edu/1901658/About_the_Coherence_of_Biophotons_Fritz_Albert_Popp_International_Institute_of_Biophysics_Biophotonics_Raketenstation_41472_Neuss_Germany
If a multiplicity of machines could be set up to socially evolve reflexive relations from scratch, they would necessarily evolve a different world, a reality incomprehensible and inconsequential to us, therefore not existent to us. https://michaelkowalik.substack.com/p/the-ontological-limits-of-artificial-intelligence
But I do not think even this is possible, because the process would be embedded in human reality, in our world, in our meaning, but missing its evolutionary roots of common embodiment.
While I enjoy grappling with this I have not succeeded in satisfying myself that this is actually correct. I think language is in the way, and this page is illustrative:
https://thephilosophyforum.com/discussion/1442/conscious-but-not-aware
One person argues that awareness is simply flow of information. No, its not.
And yet I cannot imagine that a newborn child that has not yet focused on another human face is unaware.
A newborn child is an extension of its parents, it contains some of their memory and may also be an extension of their ‘sense’ of common consciousness by the time it is born. Moreover, the world itself is an extension of humanity and of common consciousness, so the consciousness of a child could be predetermined by these conditions. I suggested previously that if an embryo were grown in a lab and completely isolated from all human contact all its life, it would not develop reflexive consciousness, but this is not quite right. ‘Complete isolation’ would require having no human parents, having no contact with humans even on non-local subatomic level (coherence) or by means of human biophoton emissions that traverse the Earth, not experiencing the human world at all, just floating in empty, cosmic darkness, and deprived of human senses. This is impossible, so a newborn is already an extension of human consciousness and bound to be conscious even in social isolation, although there is plenty of evidence that its conscious development would therefore suffer, and its integration in the human world would be negatively affected.
As for the formal model that precludes monadic self-reference and permits only indirect, socially mediated self-reference, this is based on an a priori proof, so unlikely to be wrong unless the math is wrong. It is simple math.
Amplifying
Do these thoughts come in response to the rival consciousness of AI?