Hedonism Makes You Smarter

Every value we hold dear, every fact we consider indisputable, every thread of irreducible logic we base our reality on can be traced back to something the earliest one-celled microbes realized without even possessing a brain to process it: 

Life = Good
Death = Bad

At some point in the unimaginably distant past, some microbe mutated to the point where a certain type of stimuli prompted it to either move away or move closer.

And thus ethics / logic / morality / philosophy / theology was born.

The microbes capable of moving away from threats and towards nutriment stood a far better chance of surviving and reproducing than those that did not.

Very quickly, this rudimentary value system became permanently embedded in all life on the planet.

Any organism not embracing this principle quickly gets consumed by other life or wiped out by natural forces.

As we evolved into multi-cellular organisms, some of those cells develop to specialize and capitalize on the “flee death / find food” paradigm.  Every new mutation got weighed against this relentless evolutionary razor. Any mutation that didn’t help tended to get eradicated ASAP while those that helped got reinforced.

Sure, some mutations appear useless but in their cases so long as they didn’t impair pro-survival traits.

Eventually some of these specialized cells specialized even further into organs we now call brains.

And within these brains some sort of…abstract (for lack of a better word) consciousness…

Consciousness is oft referred to by philosophers and scientists as “the hard problem.”

And not in the least because – as with pornography – everybody knows it when they see it, but no one can adequately define it.

Some call it the spirit, some call it the soul, some call it psyche, some call it mind, some call it being, some call it identity.

Some claim body and mind are one, yet it is absolutely possible to destroy most of a human’s brain – and by that, who they ever actually are -- while keeping the body alive and healthy.

Others claim body and mind are separate and that in some yet to come golden age we can transfer our minds from these rotting flesh carcasses to perfect, immutable silicon bodies…

…only they not only lack any mechanism for doing so, they can’t adequately define what it is they’ll be transferring.

This is not a trivial matter!

This is of vital importance Right Now to all of us, especially those who choose not to think of it at all.  If we are nothing but a batch pf data points in a meat computer, then our whole sense of unique and discrete individual identity evaporates.  Any transfer of data points does nothing for the original organism…or its accompanying soul / identity / mind / consciousness.

This is why I think AI will never acquire bona fide self-awareness and consciousness.  Whatever grants us possession of such an abstract concept does not exist without feeling.

And these feelings came from the first protozoa to flee death and embrace life.

What we feel in e otions originates in what we feel physically.

We feel pain, we seek to avoid it.  We feel hunger, we seek food.  These basic sensations steer us to live, and not just live but to live abundantly, to avoid being prey to predators, to avoid conditions that would physically impair us, to seek out what prolongs and enriches our existence (again, not in a monetary sense).

We can see even plants doing this without benefit of anything recognizable as a brain or identity.  They grow towards beneficial stimuli and away from harmful ones.

Once brains arrived on the scene, organisms may develop more nuanced means os assessing threat / benefit ratios.  Already wildly successful on the most basic levels found in tardigrades and worms, when brains obtained the most rudimentary means of symbolizing the external world and passing that information along to other brains / minds, the race for genuine consciousness kicked into high gear. 

At some point this symbolic version of the world began to reside full time in an abstract realm we refer to as consciousness. 

Within the physical confines or our brains we conjure up literally an infinite number of symbolic realizations of what appears to be our “real” world – or at least our interpretations of the real world.

I hold this phenomenon to be something vastly different from AI’s generative process where it admittedly guesses what the next numbers / letters / words / pixels in a sequence should be.  AI is nothing but a flow chart -- a sophisticated, intricate, and blindingly fast flow chart, but a flow chart nonetheless.

Human consciousness is far more organic -- in every sense of the word.  It places values on symbolic items representing the (supposedly) external world around us, values that derive from emotions, not a predetermined logic chain.

You see, in order to create the ethical systems we live by, in order to create the cultures we inhabit, in order to experience genuine consciousness and self-awareness, we must feel first.

This is anathema to both the “fnck your feelings” crowd and to materialists who insist we need to process everything we experience purely rationally like…well…AI programs.

Nothing could be further from the truth, of course.

To differentiate between life and death, being and non-being, all higher functioning brains develop an emotional bond towards life and a hgealthy antipathy towards death.

The mix may vary from culture to culture -- one certainly doesn’t expect a 15th century samurai to share the exact values as a 21st century valley girl -- but they share a common set of core values that can be related to and understood by each other regardless of their respective background.

Because they feel emotionally --  both stoic samurai and histrionic teen -- they create a consciousness that can experience the external world and relate that experience both to themselves and others.

By comparison, when AI correctly predicts "the sun will rise tomorrow" does it actually understand what those terms mean or only that when they appear they usually do so in a certain sequence?  This is the Chinese room paradox:  Would somebody with a set of pictograms but no way of knowing what those pictograms actually symbolized actually understand Chinese if they figured out by trial and era that certain patterns of pictograms preceded another pattern?

© Buzz Dixon