I felt like I needed to change things up a bit, so rather than writing first thing in the morning, I did other things. One of the things I did was take a walk in the cold. It was 14 degrees Fahrenheit-10 Celsius, and there was a wind. The walk felt hard, but it was good. It made me think about how easy I have it and wonder how people built this culture of luxury I take for granted more often than I don't.

As I walked, my head noise receiver tuned into this recent memory of an interview with someone researching AI. The researcher was claiming that the reason we can't replicate human consciousness is an engineering problem. When we can figure out how to build some physical object that works like a human brain, we will be able to create a conscious machine.

So there I was, walking, remembering hearing this thing, and thinking about it.

Now, before I type the following words I'm going to type, I want to make something clear: I'm 100% positive that the AI researcher knows more about AI and the attempts to create artificial brain-things. I'm confident the researcher has more raw intelligence and cognitive processing power than I do. For real.

Be that as it may, I'm shocked that this intelligent AI researcher does not think about human subjectivity as important. How can someone interested in creating something human consciousness not think about this?

(Maybe the researcher did think about human subjectivity but did not say anything about it. That's possible.)  

Human subjects are un-resolvable contradictions. We are subjected to being in a body that has the capacity to speak and that knows that it will die.

To be a human subject is (among other things) to be subjected to the impossibility of having a harmonious relationship between our body's desire to enjoy itself, which tends to lead to some fun but destructive sorts of behaviors, and the demands emanating from the social bonds that we've developed because we have to share the world with other people.

Do AI researchers who want to re-make human consciousness think about this? If they don't think about this, why don't they think about this?  

-◉-

So there you have it. This is what happens when I write at night.

As always, thank you for the gift of your attention.  

-N