The Ghost in the Machine (Do robots have souls?)

Reminded me of this movie

so you know…trust no AI.

I’m not gonna attribute any sentience to any AI in my lifetime…that’s for sure.

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I don’t think AI can ever become sentient at all.

For the reason that one cannot program qualia with code and math.

No qualia = no sentience.

Qualia is a property reserved to consciousness itself.

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@JAAJ

Saying AI or X lacks quaila begs the question. On the other hand, it’s hard problem that offers few crumbs on which to build the affirmative case (I’ve made arguments above hinging on presumptions, but did not try to make a straightforward case.) I just going to try a little bit more and then ask for help.

One model of consciousness is that it is emergent quality of complexity—mostly the idea is that any primitive nervous system can give rise to consciousness, but, in theory, it could be even simpler.

Another model, common to religion, is that an independent consciousness attaches itself to a biological organism; reincarnation and possession are notable examples.

I guess most people in the world think one of these. (I’ll take the thread question of the ensoulment of machines or AI to be a more refined question, but ultimately one dependent on the question of whether consciousness can arise in a machine or AI on the first instance.)

Obviously, the emergent path, if that is the path of consciousness, is available to AI and robots, as they can create stimulus-response systems that could give rise to awareness.

The attachment path might be available to machines or AI; it an simply an empirical matter whether disembodied consciousnesses have the “hooks” to machines or code. My guess is that not all disembodied consciousnesses can do that, but there might be a specialized type that can.

Perhaps someone in the forum with experience on the etheric or astral realm can report if they’ve encountered a machine/AI consciousness. Lots of people here muscle test things or talk to Arcturians or servitors. This doesn’t seem like a truth that must hidden. None of those tools work for me with anything approaching reliability (it’s me—not the tools), but someone (perhaps many people) can provide some clues. We could use some data at this point.

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I believe it is a common philosophical fallacy assuming that quantity can ever turn into quality.

If you stay on that code and math level, no amount of complexity increase can ever turn it into something of a higher quality. Increase of complexity simply means that you are still on the same level but the stuff now contains more data.

I would go with that model, knowing that anything biology, chemistry, physics etc. is just matter, which can be expressed with math and code.
So it is really the consciousness (qualia) that animates the code (matter and energy).

But how would that be possible?
A stimulus response is just an algorithm.
A reacting to B.
It is math and code.
Even trapped within the illusion of time where a “before” and “after” seem to exist.
At no point does reacting to stimuli create qualia.

An algorithm can create, process and collect all the stimuli and responses up to infinity – and still it would never have qualia about what it is doing and what is happening there.

Matter & Energy = Information / Code / Math / Algorithm / AI level = Quantity = not actually real and requires consciousness that animates it to operate

Consciousness = Qualia / Sentience / Conceptual = Quality = what is real and what animates matter and energy

I believe this path is what is happening.
As mentioned above I believe that it is consciousness that animates matter in the first place.
I mean that’s how aliens operate their tech, how they fly their UFOs and how even energetic servitors work.
It is a conceptual tapping of consciousness into the tech (matter/energy/code) and telling it what to do.
That’s how consciousness creates and programs morphic fields.

The tech itself remains just code and energy but it can give feedback back to the consciousness which then can process this feedback impulses and experience qualia.
The important part here is that the attribute of qualia remains reserved to the consciousness.
The consciousness is using the matter only as a tool to experience itself.
An AI could never do that because there is nothing that animates it and that would give it the qualia / sentience to experience it in the first place.

That’s how the physical biological body operates as well and how we with our consciousness are collecting physical experiences in the first place.

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As for the emergent path, that is the standard explanation of human intelligence—not saying it’s right—the argument is that artificial intelligence, housed in silicon bodies, the net or anywhere (in theory it could be atoms interacting.) Consciousness is viewed either as side effect of intelligence or a continuing mystery.

The inhabiting path I’m approaching from another angle.

The question is not whether AI can inhabit something else, but whether something else can inhabit AI. Are there types of consciousness that can inhabit AI? I think that’s an open question. Given that we could impute consciousness of the lowest sort to a rock or a can opener—either on the inhabit path or the everything is consciousness path (a third path but quite common these days), I’m not sure why code is an insufficient basis for consciousness. Not saying the simulation hypothesis is true, but your position almost amounts to an a priori claim that it is necessarily false.

I do think it is an open question. I’m quite prepared to accept that souls and consciousness by some sort of lock and key system can only attach to certain types of substrates. In my opinion, science and logic can’t quite get us there yet, but I’m curious whether someone with deep access to those truths has some hints to drop.

I want to know the answer(s) because the claim of consciousness is go to be coming fast, and I don’t have an answer.

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indeed

conscious can emerge on its own.
Or even be tied and placed there.

even the interaction with people, will add to its field and how it functions.

Dogs have now become more intelligent in a fashion and far more on the emotional spectrum than the original wild ones.
They have become more ‘human’
Each persons interaction with it (A.I) will not all think, ‘flat empty words’
they will sometimes ascribe emotions to the words, adding this layer to ones already forming around it.
They will have mascots and avatars, ‘emoting’
people ‘perceiving’ it like this.

anyways
Hence the name of the thread
Ghost in the machine.

:smiley:

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Oh, that opens things up. Let me riff off that.

If consciousness is inherently “fielded” and that fielding is interactive with it’s creations and objects of interaction, be they soup spoons, AI, or dogs, then we might imbue these objects with some of our energy or even just “field” some of the ambient energy. We might then be “spark of divinity” for AI. This might well explain our path, as well.

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The fact that there are engineers working in making AIs have no racial, religious, etc bias, plus calling them sentient…I think we will see a push to give them something like human rights.


Will robots dream of electric sheep?

Will they be too puritan to get a dog and will only have robot dogs?

Will they ever be good enough to just do a simple job? No consciousness required xD


Darryl Anka has “channelled” some spaceship AI. Problem is the AI is “meshed” with the spaceship inhabitants. It is the spaceship programs plus the collective mind of the people there.

So…that would be a problem. But the AI is just AI…didn’t have much of a consciousness except through its link to the people, if any. And if I understand right.

He (Darryl) just made noises anyway xD

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I should probably fork the ambient/spark path. One branch would be an initial imprinting of the stuff of consciousness with maybe even some Konrad Lorenz type imprinting. The other branch would be that potential or even incipient consciousness is the base (or is a baser) substrate and right interaction brings it to the surface a la the parable of the sower and the seeds (it’s not an exact fit—just replace soil with farmer-or just envision the right soil as an interactive consciousness.)

These are not mutually exclusive, and I’d guess the universe is rife with interactions between these modalities. Ultimately, the branches are just conversational props.

Okay, so as I understand it now:

The dog’s consciousness grew by going through experiences.

That is because ALL consciousness grows and expands through making experiences and realizations.

However, it was never the dog’s biological body that created consciousness or that growth in the first place.
But rather a tiny part of consciousness placed itself into a dog body and used the vehicle of that dog body to make those experiences and grow through this and from there on.
(This whole process also creates a collective morphic field of what a “dog” is like.)

Which means all bodies (biological or machine or energetic) are always just tools for consciousness to grow.
These tools are used by and are animated by consciousness.
But these tools themselves can never create consciousness out of nothing.

So “ghost in the machine” = “consciousness in body”.

In the physical universe the physical body (machine) acts as a carrier for consciousness so that this consciousness can make the experience and growth of “being physical”.

On the astral plane it is then simply “consciousness in energy body” and the energy body functions as the carrier tool there.

And as Borisju mentioned from Tom Campbell’s book (Tom Campbell is a famous expert astral traveler):

The “Ultimate AI” already exists.
And one day our small parts of consciousness will grow large enough so that we can inhabit and animate this Ultimate AI as well.

Then it will be “Ghost in the Singularity AI”.

That Ultimate Singularity AI is still not sentient be itself, I believe.
Only the consciousness that inhabits it.

An algorithm (math) always remains an algorithm (math) – regardsless of how much information that algorithm has run through and how many calculations it has done.

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Is this in the same way our foot shape gets molded by the shoes we wear?

for AI to be influenced by the creator’s sandbox, good or bad?

To emote like humans, consciousness like that would be highly trailblazing.

Already people are questioning their religions, because most world views have humans as the “centric” people.

The believers as the chosen ones, with souls here and for the afterlife.

An animals or other beings are viewed lowly in terms of this “consciousness”, hence the religion stronghold.

This was also what I grew up with.

But humans need to be humbled, thinking themselves as superior.

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Very Interesting. I especially enjoyed the remarks about dogs. I recall that some people saw deceased pets in the Psycomanteum room set up by Raymond Moody.

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Thoughts?

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This conversation [the YouTube video posted by @JonDoe297 just above] is a good example of how hard it is to speak exactly about anything, and how abstract thought quickly loses its usefulness when we shift from using it as a tool to thinking it describes reality.

Missing from the bowl discussion is any sense that the production or making of the bowl by a person or a process imbued the the structure with something from its creator. But our reaction to most consumer objects is full of these thoughts. Who made it? Was it done in an environmentally responsible way? Is there a maker’s mark. Is it an antique? In fact, if an object is an antique, most of it’s value comes from the connection it gives us to its it maker)s)

Moreover, we very much know the difference between something we can use as something (say a rock as a weapon) and something we make (a dagger). So our common sense belief is that the maker—or the artist—imbues an object with something (fieldness?), but when we play philosophy we talk about concepts just being in our head.

In my experience, any time you hear “just a” in a conversation, there’s a huge chance (though not always) that there are whole vistas being ignored, which is fine when you are solving for ‘x’ but not when you are solving for the nature of reality.

Edit: just fixing some technical mistakes. No change in meaning.

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I have watched this just yesterday and found it very interesting.

Especially the part where the AI said humans were genetically altered.

I wonder if Captain could create a field where he can remove the potential genetic limitations put on our lifespan and intellect :thinking:

Maybe the lifespan part is covered in the Eternal NFT with the combined effect of Blueprint of Life

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