AI or artificial intelligence is becoming increasingly topical. People don’t know what to make of it, and strange ideas are emerging. Is that factory of computers, with thousands of Nvidia chips comparable, or even the same as human consciousness? No: that’s nonsense.
The same thing happened with the early days of the internet. Amazed with the new medium we called it “cyberspace” and wondered how and in what sense it was ‘real’ when people were communicating immaterially. No one theorises this now, we just accept the communications at Facebook and X for what they are.
This is the article to consider, and it’s interesting, but confusing if you don’t remember a few simple facts.
The physical reality of AI is a computer factory. The reality of a human being is a walking, sensing, feeling, eating, sleeping and thinking thing where thinking is only part of the being.
We think differently for example, according to energy levels and mood. If you’re on a long walk in high mountains you have to eat, drink, and rest sensibly or your judgement ability suffers. Hikers know this, and how serious it can be, when a wrong decision can be disastrous.
“Are you OK” a woman once said to me in the Lake District.
“Yes I’m OK, why?”
“You look like shit” she said.
Thanks doc. Because she was a doctor, and had noticed my white face, struggling progress, and insisted I stop and have a snack. I tried saying yes, but you’re off duty, but she was having none of it. It’s a physical struggle when you need food, dangerously intellectual when you’re not sure about a route.
You read in navigation books if you get confused, and start to panic, sit down, rest, have a snack or warm drink and think carefully. This includes the important advice that you can often, if necessary, retreat to a place where you were thirty minutes or an hour earlier, and start again from a known position.
Mood related thinking doesn’t happen with AI and nor does the intuitive creativity of an artist, or this understanding of Bertrand Russell. “Fact” would be hard to programme into a computer, if it uses “evidence” found on the internet. Then there’s the domain of ethics based on feeling observations about people, society, and what in Buddhism they call metta bhavana: kindness, basically, from beings with a heart as well as a brain:
A computer factory can be switched off like a light bulb. It runs on electricity. How that compares to a human being is a curious subject I won’t engage with except to point out how it is hugely different.
Return the electricity, and the AI is alive again. The point is, the two agencies or forms of “consciousness” are vastly different in terms of function, depth, derivation, and meaning. AI computers are 24/7. Human beings are 16/8 with nightly dreams, daily breakfast, and evening rest. We easily understand that human beings are not only thinking creatures.
Consciousness, which is not actually thinking, is partly spatial. We have a sense of being in space thus where the kitchen is, where we left the book we are reading, where the bus stop is in relation to the town centre, the airport in relation to other countries.
As a child I found it fun to write my name and address in the front of a book like this: James Lomax, ABC, Kent, Britain, World, Universe. It’s something children do, as part of their psychology. AI is code running in a silicon chip with no spatial reality, no sense of wonder if it “sees” deep space images from the Hubble telescope.
‘Thinking’, in digital language form, is all that a computer does. Organic life is categorically different. Consider a tree for example, not even a human being. The cellular intelligence of a tree is more complex than a computer in terms of what it does growing and surviving in relation to sun, rain, wind and earth. The photograph is a favourite tree I’ve watched for many years. It’s small and doesn’t noticeably grow, because of bonsai-like conditions.
This is a different point from observations about the power of AI, how it will and already does exceed human capacity. Understanding the protein fold of DNA was achieved with AI. You can ask the large language model to build a simple computer game, as a random request, and it does so in a few minutes using the subsidiary code of HTML (the architecture of the internet) JavaScript (a powerful way of controlling it) and SVG (Scalable Vector Graphics). When a million people do that and say this is correct, that is incorrect, and make this smoother and faster, the ‘intelligence’ improves and grows.
No one thought early computers were the same as human consciousness. The difference is one of size, complexity and power not the character of it as such. AI is like a pet dog you tell to fetch a ball. If it learns to do it in a second, and finds a better route, when it requires 30 seconds to do it yourself, that’s an impressive dog but still a dog.