Life, Consciousness, AI & Aliens
Life
We know what life is…on Earth.
We see it all around us, we are part of it.
As we define life here on Earth, it involves cellular structure, RNA and DNA. Everything living thing we’ve encountered -- and a multitude of non-living things (looking at you, viruses) -- possess those qualities.
That’s no requirement that life found anywhere else in the universe needs to possess them.
Oh, it’s a good starting point, but it’s like Star Trek explaining away their use of human actors to portray aliens by claiming it’s parallel evolution.
No.
As J.B.S. Haldane famously observed, “The Universe is not only queerer than we suppose, but queerer than we can suppose.”
Or as Shakespeare penned, “There are more things in heaven and Earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy.”
In a sci-fi story I once wrote, I proposed “Life-as-we-know-it, Life-as-we-don’t-know-it, Near-life, Faux-life, and a broad catchall category best summed up as Not-actually-life-but-a-reasonable-facsimile.”
With only Earth as a model, we’re hard pressed to imagine what possibilities may actually exist.
Indeed, we may be overlooking life forms that already co-exist with us simply because we cannot recognize them as life.
Consciousness
Philosophers and physicists call it “the hard problem.”
That is to say: What exactly is consciousness?
The pithy retort is Descartes’ “I think, therefore I am” but that neatly sidesteps the issues of adequately defining “think,” “I,” and “am.”
As Steven Barnes once asked me in a conversation on philosophy, “Who are you?”
Meaning “What is the core essence of your being?”
In many ways it’s like trying to directly look at your own optic nerve.
You can look at images of your optic nerve, under rare conditions you can observe a reflection of your optic nerve, you can deduce the existence and health of your optic nerve by how you observe other thing, but you can’t actually see it.
Consciousness seems to be a will-o-the-wisp that retreats from scrutiny as soon as attention is paid to it.
The ancients called it a soul but even they couldn’t define what that was.
At worst we get people imagining Casper sits in the driver’s seat of their brain, guiding their corporeal form along.
Okay, we can live with that analogy, but it still doesn’t explain what is Casper exactly?
Is consciousness the same as identity? I don’t think so. We see too many cases of multiple personalities, or amnesiacs who permanently lose all memory of who they were, or dementia patients who bit by bit see their identity -- the “who” of their being -- erode away until nothing is left but a mindless husk.
Despite all that, some essence of consciousness remains in all but the most extreme cases.
We see persons suffering from irreparable brain damage living on in a vegetative state, most of their mental functions shut down, yet retaining enough of a biological spark to keep the heart and lungs functioning.
For human beings, death comes when the brain stem shuts down. Individual organs may be saved and transplanted to live on in others, but the brain is forever lost.
Consciousness -- and identity, which is different from personality -- are clearly linked to organic brain function.
There is an as yet unproven hypothesis that consciousness is the cells of the brain somehow tapping into the quantum universe at some sub-atomic level, which is a cool idea but also neatly sidesteps the issue of identity.
As noted, identity and personality often overlap, but are not synonymous. Again, we have copious examples of personality altering following some trauma -- real or emotional -- to the brain or mind (another inadequately defined component of the hard problem) while the person affected still retains the memory and identity they possessed before.
A.I. & Aliens
As Peter Watts points out in his novel Blindsight, consciousness may not be necessary for an organism to interact in a seemingly intelligent manner with the rest of the universe.
It’s possible for non-conscious beings to behave in a coordinated, seemingly intelligent manner without there being any “mind” or “soul” or Casper guiding them.
Marv Wolfman once hypothesized mathematical formulas of sufficient complexity to become self-aware without the necessity of a physical form.
In the current brouhaha over AI, what’s often overlooked is that what is currently being passed of as artificial intelligence is just a crude mimicking program, designed to produce responses to specific commands based on patterns it gleans from previous input.
As noted, that’s fine for a toy, or for a routine that requires searching through mountains of input for molecules of data.
The challenge is that currently it produces acceptable mediocrity at virtually no cost, encouraging the lazy and / or greedy to use it to replace actual intelligent human minds.
It also raises a question as yet unanswered as to whether AI can obtain genuine consciousness.
Look, we can’t even adequately define consciousness in ourselves, how can we define it in an algorithm?
Indeed, how can we be sure that consciousness for a machine would match consciousness for a human being?
We see enough in animal behavior to recognize many species must possess some form of consciousness that closely parallels our own, but how can we tell what a machine possesses?
Is an anthill or a beehive conscious in the way we use the term?
I’ve often wondered if money isn’t some parasitic concept that infected the human species, the way Ophiocordyceps unilateralis compels ants into self-destructive behavior for its own benefit.
Is money conscious? Is it aware of its own existence? It certainly seems to work to preserve itself, to grow and to expand its influence via human proxies.
It’s been asked if AI were to truly start creating art, it would be art reflecting its experience and consciousness, not necessarily a format or even a medium that we humans could observe, much less understand.
The famous Fermi paradox assumes that life and intelligence will be something we can comprehend.
I think that’s a mighty arrogant presupposition on the part of humanity.
© Buzz Dixon
