Exploring the Essence of Consciousness (2)
- Marco Aurelio GV
- Jun 8, 2024
- 5 min read
Updated: Dec 27, 2024
In this second part, I keep on with my speculations about the essence of consciousness. As usual, I am backed by reliable research to avoid saying nonsense. That being said, let's get to work and try to show you my ideas about this ever-lasting mystery: consciousness.
Hypothetically, consciousness has 3 evolutionary levels:
Individual Consciousness - Every organism, no matter the complexity begins its existence as a spark that becomes an individuality. I cannot say whether or not this hypothesis is valid to the panpsychism's ideas.
Multifaceted Consciousness - Consciousness is fractioned into multiple parts like a fractal (this could justify the "Parallel Universes" theory). However, this hypothesis goes against some religions' beliefs, including the Spiritism. According to them, after death, the soul goes to heaven, eternity, or other dimensions. What if we have various consciousnesses? Would we need to die several times until the consciousness becomes the whole?
Collective Consciousness - The very last level of individuality. It would be a kind of "Supreme Mind", "Cosmic Consciousness" and so forth according to each species group.
Technically, consciousness has 3 sensory levels:
Cognitive: the ability to perceive and process information.
Emotional: the ability to feel and experience emotions.
Sentient: the ability to know and understand yourself and be aware of the world around you.
Given that awareness varies according to the species, it seems animals, plants, and microorganisms, also have those conciousness perceptions.
Consciousness that dreams
Although many studies suggest that dreams are stories produced from a set of fragments of short-, medium- and long-term memories, it is unknown how consciousness functions during sleeping state.
Besides Science does not explain other dream nuances such as foreseeing the future (premonitory dreams) and other revealing dreams that go against logic.
The Medical Doctor, Heidi Moawad states: "Regardless of faith of any individual who enters the dream state, there are numerous instances in which dreams actually do come true in ways that were not anticipated. Most prophetic dreams do not bear spiritually significant meaning and hold no link to life-changing events. That is why dreams are so enigmatic.".
So during "out-of-the-body experiences", what makes dreams happen? Does the brain do it by itself?
Counciessness mysteries get blurrier when becoming a "living entity's maker"!
Consciousness that materializes
The so-called "thought-forms", also known as ‘elementals’ or ‘miasmas’, are entities created from negative human emotions. Therefore, they can harm their creators.
In other words, our consciousness would have the capacity to crystallize living beings due to an intense emotion. These"entities" then impregnate and affect their creators' magnetic field (aura) causing many mental and physical disturbances.
According to books about this topic, those elementals also affect the environment as well. So the question remains: what is the process of formation of those living forms? Hence does consciousness have the power to fabricate monsters that become urban legends or local folklore?
Consciousness that "disappears"
What happens when people literally "lose their minds" known as cognitive diseases and any other severe mental illness?
When an individual suddenly starts suffering from dementia and its variants, where does consciousness go? Does it "sleep" inside the person? Or does it leave the body momentarily? In another condition, what happens to the consciousness during a vegetative state when responsiveness and awareness are absent due to cerebral dysfunction?
In short, If we barely know how our own consciousness works, how can we know the "upcoming" consciousness of a machine?
The Consciousness of Artificial Intelligence
One of the greatest controversies nowadays is the possibility of AI being endowed with autonomous consciousness and so being able to make decisions on its own, without human intervention, i.e., no human inputs necessary).
What type of consciousness would work properly in a machine? Good or bad? This trend is tormenting not only the catastrophists but the religious as well. A proof that God doesn't exist?
The Consciousness researcher, and neurologist Christof Koch, said: “We know of no fundamental law or principle operating in this universe that prohibits the existence of subjective feelings in artifacts or objects designed or developed by human beings.”
The scientist may be correct in his statement if panpsychism can be proven. So, this concept allows a specific consciousness in AI, no matter of what its neural structure is made of.
Theories that make sense to me
So assuming panpsychism is real means that all things have a mind-like quality. That said will this idea explain those allegedly haunted dolls that become “alive” such as the famous “Anabelle doll”?
Thus, couldn't this hypothesis reinforce the possibility of an AI having its own type of consciousness? Unless this whole story about the haunted doll is some kind of mind deception.
Nonetheless, if some consciousness does possess a lifeless object it can also take a house and so it becomes haunted. The same towards witchcraft, talismans, voodoo, and, religious "sacred" images. In other words, if this hypothesis can explain all those phenomena. What about machines?
The Computer scientist Alan Turing once questioned whether machines can think in his thesis (1950), “Can machines think?”. In this study, he created a game in which a machine would impersonate a human being. For him, “Any machine that succeeded - giving the impression of intelligence, would be considered intelligent.”.
So it seems Turing was prophetic in his consideration of AI consciousness when this topic wasn't slightly imagined yet.
The intelligence of a machine has more to do with “doing” and consciousness has more to do with “being”.
AI consciousness will never be like humans or any living being.
We have nowadays many AI platforms that amaze us and seem to have some kind of consciousness such as Google's AlphaZero and DeepMind, as well as large language models such as OpenAI (ChatGPT) and Gemini which, despite being “almost” perfect imitations of neural networks, are far from rational,
On the other hand, scientists who are trying making a synthetic brain as close to the human brain as possible. However, so far it is nothing more than a neural network less complex than a rat's brain.
The human brain will never be emulated exactly like it is!
The Australian philosopher, David Chalmers, has pointed out pretty clearly: “Consciousness cannot be explained by current science. When it does, a 'new physics' will be needed to study it. How can we explain whether AI can have consciousness if even humans don't understand theirs? Hence attempts will be limited because we only know the external properties of objects and how they interact, but very little about their internal properties, consciousness."
Chalmers meant that there is no way of knowing whether or not an AI will have consciousness because it must be according to the machine's neural patterns.
In other words, perceptions vary from organism to organism, i.e. humans, animals, plants, and microorganisms. This principle also applies to the Universe according to philosophers. Meaning that all celestial bodies (Earth included) might have a kind of consciousness.
If we can't “perceive”, in measurable terms, the behavior of consciousness in living beings in general, what about AI's consciousness?
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