An exciting journey has begun. The destination is a reality with or without the memory of mankind.
Research in the field of artificial intelligence offers a new type of tool for the endoscopy of brain function. The possibility of simulating neural circuits promises an insight in the relationship between the subconscious and reality, bypassing the barrier of consciousness.
Several centuries have passed since ‘natural language’ was identified as a scientific obstacle to the development of knowledge. It took many centuries, but the problem was finally addressed with a narrow but clear bypass. The official common people language was abandoned and artificial language was adopted as the official scientific language, built upon the adaptation of symbolic order from Applied Mathematics. Liberated from the bonds and the prejudices of the common psychology (and it’s common sense), science has made remarkable progress reshaping the world. The ‘new language’ of science was once again able to connect with the physical world by describing a mathematically consistent reality.
But during the peak of its glory, as the knowledge of the world was now expanding from to the depths of spacetime to strange subatomic realms beyond the wildest imagination… suddenly things came to halt. A schism appeared in science that no human mind could interpret. The strange, yet absolutely real quantum world in the subatomic level was not compatible with the real observable world where gravity reigns. The attemps to fill in the gap with string theories only led to more doubts regarding the scientific integrity.
This came as a late reminder that the original problem of applied mathematics of natural language, had never been solved. It had been ‘temporarily’ bypassed by the shiny applied mathematics of symbolic order logic. The same old proplem emerged more vigorously than ever. A series of epistemological and philosophical problems that have been put aside by the scientific galloping now came forward again. Meanwhile pure mathematics revealed the inconsistency of every possible logic order in a single blow. Even though pure math could stand the aftermath, science would never really recover after Gödel’s proof. In a greater sense the question was; Can human consciousness keep pace with reality?
Scientific knowledge was at first disassociated from human experience. More recently science was disassociated with consistency. Reality became once again inaccessible or if you prefer unavailable to human mind. There was “something else” now standing in the way.
Essentially, consciousness systematically denies the reality produced by scientific applications. On the one hand, people used more and more tools of applied mathematics, on the other, consciousness undermined the importance of scientific findings. For example, the devastating consequences of the ideology of profit are systematically ignored as something that will be resolved in the future even when we have already turned the immediate environment into a hell for hosting animal organisms (including us). The time to solve this problem is… last year! But how do we solve this in the future?… Somehow, the conscious “kind” appears to live in another world, where magic and will solve the problems that certain conscious carbon-based animal activity itself creates.
The human conscious brain seems to systematically ignore and forget it own findings. It keeps undermining the importance of scientific knowledge when it conflicts with “common sense” or common phycology. And here we are again where we started! Almost… Now we have a private reality that claims to be public or the opposite for as long we can.
On the other hand, advanced applied mathematics devices (also known as computers) did not present the same problem. For computers, every reality is as real as the next one as long as the information is complete (meaning there is a halt somewhere). Logic order machines seem to be missing the evaluative criterion of consciousness, the same kind of obstacle that natural language “once” presented.
Following up on the natural language problem, now is the time to face the problem of consciousness (for the sake of science). Consciousness itself, the obvious content of human intelligence, is presented as a cognitive barrier. In this case, however, things are not that simple; We cannot approach an artificial consciousness, at least directly. In this new era, for science, consciousness is treated as a mnemic construction of another “Consciousness” operating in real time. This Consciousness is capable of constructing both reality and the “small” human consciousness. What we experience as consciousness is essentially the past of an information sent by a Machine. This emerging machine of consciousness works by constructing the memory of being human. At this point comes the role of artificial intelligence to study the operation of such a Machine. The idea is simple; Through the construction of neural circuits, we will simulate the function of the brain and produce a new artificial consciousness. This artificial consciousness will operate in parallel with the human one to correct the problem of ideological rigidity. In short, we have indirectly admitted that human consciousness is not adequate, neither for this world nor for any possible world.
People imagine that a piece of human consciousness will remain active, but this is no different from the “magic” prejudices that brought us to the cognitive impasse. Along with attempts to build machines, they try to impose restrictions on post-simulations in order to preserve the current ideology. They are afraid that a brain simulation machine is likely to throw human consciousness into the garbage at the exit stage. The ideology is now called “alignment”. It’s natural for them to fail. Such machines would be one of the same, post-simulation machines, mere tools of ideology reproduction and not genuine simulations. Another attitude is to accept the inadequacy of the small human consciousness and to leave open the possibility that the memory of human ideology is neither capable nor necessary condition for a conscious organization of the matter.