Posted on 01/29/2015 11:00:31 AM PST by Reverend Saltine
Computers have as much consciousness as cars or concrete. This will not change. They’re machines.
They can be programmed to follow directions and calculate certain kinds of solutions within those directed parameters. That’s it. That’s the beginning and end of the story.
Why do some technocrats believe computers will gain actual consciousness?
They think a) the brain is a machine that expresses consciousness via information processing, and b) information processing is all the consciousness there is.
To sum up, technocrats are high-IQ idiots.
You can assemble all the information in the world and cross-reference it 100 billion different ways; you can solve pre-set problems with this information; you can turn the whole info package upside down, inside out, and sideways, and you’ll extract not one drop of consciousness.
Consciousness isn’t a function of the sophistication of a machine. You can put a face on the machine, and give it hair; you can provide arms and legs and feet and hands; you can make it speak; you can make it walk and run and fly. And you still have a machine. That’s all.
Likewise, you can freeze a brain at death, and 100 years later thaw it, place it in a body, wire it up, and you’ll have, at best, a machine. Most probably a poorly operating machine. No consciousness. Your Aunt Marigold will not return.
Why is this so hard to understand? Because there are people who are madly in love with machines. They prefer them to humans. They therefore want to believe machines are alive and have consciousness, choice, freedom, intelligence.
But here’s the real kicker. If people set aside the tons of propaganda about the brain being the source of consciousness, they’re left with a gaping mystery. A hole. They don’t know where to turn. They can’t fall back on “science.”
What’s staring them in the face is: consciousness is non-material. It isn’t made out of electrons and protons and nuclei and quarks and mesons and wavicles. It never was, and it never will be.
Neither is imagination or creative power. Those capabilities aren’t “made out of matter.”
At a certain level, the Newtonian world of push-pull and the quantum world of entanglement are left behind in the rear-view mirror.
They don’t explain the core of what you are or I am.
The shuck and jive about hooking human brains up to a super-duper computer and producing new consciousness (“The Singularity”) is a fairy tale for gullible doofuses.
Why do I keep hammering on this subject? Because the 21st century is the century of the brain. In research labs all over the world, neuroscientists are working on ways to alter the brain, program it. Control it. The think they have the right to do that because, for them, consciousness doesn’t really exist.
There are myriad ideologies on this planet that base their operations on the notion of The Group, the mass, the collective, and they fervently want to wipe out the idea of the free individual, the individual with power, with imagination, with creative force. Which means they want to wipe out consciousness, because consciousness rests with the individual.
These ideologues are grotesque.
You want to see the true consequences of Sandy Hook, the Aurora Theater, the Boston Marathon? Go back and watch Stanley Kubrick’s Clockwork Orange, if you can handle it. It’s all there: the seeds of reprogramming the human so he is quiescent, agreeable, peaceful, obedient, controlled.
To justify the overall operation, they always pick the “madman, the mass murderer.” This is their way in. This is their hook. “We must re-condition the outlaw and save him and save us from him…”
Go back and watch Kubrick’s 2001. In the middle of some preposterous nonsense about “the monolith” that holds the key to advanced evolution, there’s a very compelling story about one man, Bowman, who, aboard his ship, dismantles the master computer, Hal, and takes over his own destiny.
Hal is the ultimate computer who appears to be human. He talks the talk all the way. He feels, he tries to survive, he wants to help.
But none of that is true. Hal is a machine. Hal is programmed (or misprogrammed) to block the mission, to destroy it, to destroy Bowman, who as it turns out, is on a voyage to greater consciousness.
Yes, the monolith, a kind of multidimensional device, finally gives Bowman that consciousness…but that’s a literary ploy for a generation of emerging tech heads and LSD heads in the audience: the high-IQ yokels.
At the core, the story is actually about one individual who goes beyond the machine, and finds out who he is and how much power he actually has.
Against him is arrayed the total technological sophistication of civilization: systems, organizations, bureaucracies, official scientists.
The 21st century is the century of the brain. Mapping it, changing it, diverting it, taking it over. On behalf of The Group.
For the past 13 years, at this site, and for many years before that, my work has been about preserving the primacy of the individual. But not just preserving. Expanding. Taking the blinders off. Discovering what the individual can do with imagination, with creative-force.
A criminal class is busy inventing reality for us. They’ve been doing it since the dawn of time. They assert THEIR creations as the only ones that count. They insist on being the monopolists of imagination.
But the imagination and creative power of the non-criminal, free, independent individual is potentially titanic. It goes far beyond this cartoon of a society in which we presently live.
This society is bent on circumscribing and diluting consciousness of that individual power.
Who says yes to that? Who says no?
There is an eternal no. It can only come from the individual.
Jon Rappoport Jon was a candidate for a US Congressional seat in the 29th District of California. He maintains a consulting practice for private clients, the purpose of which is the expansion of personal creative power. Nominated for a Pulitzer Prize, he has worked as an investigative reporter for 30 years, writing articles on politics, medicine, and health for CBS Healthwatch, LA Weekly, Spin Magazine, Stern, and other newspapers and magazines in the US and Europe. Jon has delivered lectures and seminars on global politics, health, logic, and creative power to audiences around the world. .
Blows My Mind !
Stanley Kubrick was way ahead of his time.
For a very long time, like most people, I did not really understand his movies like 2001 Space Odyssey (meaning the ending), A Clock Work Orange, Eyes Wide Shut and Apocalypse Now. I mean I understood it the way most Americans and not the deeper meaning.
However, I view his films as genius today.
Not by a longshot. A single human cell is so complex that the brightest scientists have only a rudimentary knowledge of how it works.
“Hal is a machine. Hal is programmed (or misprogrammed) to block the mission, to destroy it, to destroy Bowman, who as it turns out, is on a voyage to greater consciousness.”
No, Hal wasn’t programmed to sabotage the mission. He was programmed to ensure the completion of the mission, at any cost. In fact, he was the only one on the ship that knew all the details of the mission, because the flight crew was not trusted with the most classified information. He decided, based on his logic and programming, that the humans must be unreliable and a threat to the completion of the mission. So, he did what seemed to him to be the logical thing and tried to eliminate the threat.
And therein lies the problem with AI.
That doesn't mean that it isn't an extremely useful literary tool for examining what it means to be human.
Consider the differing treatment of Machine Intelligence in:
Isaac Asimov's I, Robot, et. al.,
Philip K. Dick's Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? aka Blade Runner,
Frank Herbert's Dune,
Robert Heinlein's The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress,
the Japanese Manga series Ghost in the Shell, etc.
The meaning of machine sentience is a significant part of the SF novel I am finishing up.
"Ceterum censeo 0bama esse delendam."
Garde la Foi, mes amis! Nous nous sommes les sauveurs de la République! Maintenant et Toujours!
(Keep the Faith, my friends! We are the saviors of the Republic! Now and Forever!)
LonePalm, le Républicain du verre cassé (The Broken Glass Republican)
i agree
"Since HAL was capable of operating Discovery without human assistance, it was decided that he should be programmed to complete the mission autonomously in the event the crew was incapacitated or killed.
He was given full knowledge of the true objective... and instructed not to reveal anything to Bowman or Poole. He was instructed to lie.
HAL was told to lie - by people who find it easy to lie. HAL doesn't know how, so he couldn't function. He became paranoid."
“he 10 Most Insane Direction Decisions by Stanley Kubrick”
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yyt6aFI_sfA
Finally, someone who is not afraid to say what I think.
So what happens when you have multiple large neural networks all interconnected? What will it do?
...nobody knows. We just know neural networks learn, we just can’t follow the complexity.
This is separate than having a soul but I’m not sure that being self-aware is impossible.
Handle it? It's practically a comedy.
All we have are people handwaving their little tales, like the one the above.
Exactly to the point of logic. Logical or rational arguments do not work when significant parts of the argument are undefined.
Consciousness is undefined. After that is understood, talking about what it isn’t, saying what it is not using logic is counterproductive. Alan Watts used to talk about what consciousness seems to be, but shining the light back on a flashlight to see how the flashlight illuminates does not yield rational results. It yields “other results”.
The same question is “How many angels can dance on the head of a pin?”
DK
The same question is “How many angels can dance on the head of a pin?”
Maybe the question should be, do the angels know they
are dancing on the head of a pin, and would it make
any difference to them?
I believe that was Francis Ford Coppola.
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