The Materialists and the Soul of AI
I've been having lots of conversations with people outside of technology on AI, in the last week I talked with a hippie water therapy guy about it, and yesterday talked with a Christian about it. We inevitably get to the discussion of consciousness and whether it can be replicated by AI
Materialists say that nothing about the human brain is off limits to the computational magicians known as AI. Spiritual people tend to say that what makes us human is outside the inevitable "eating of the abstract knowledge world" by computational magicians.
I've done some deep contemplation and reading of the works of people I consider to be enlightened masters such as Nisargadatta Maharaj and Ramana Maharshi.
My readings of these masters make me think that the materialists may be closer to the truth then the new-agers
In his absolute masterclass "Prior to Consciousness" which are translations of his final talks before he died in the early 80s, Maharaj becomes quite clear on the nature of the ego and ties it directly to the body. Anything that can be cognized is part of the 'chemical', part of the phenomenal world that non-dualists consider to be illusory because its made up of abstract images in the mind (we don't really interact with the objective world outside of our subjectivity)
Consciousness itself is tied directly to the body. Without the body, consciousness's ability to be conscious of itself goes away but he differs from the materialists and says that absolute subjectivity is reality and that the nothingness that materialists posit happens is an illusion
Here in lies a subtlety that may be missed:
Everything that we think we are is a bit of an illusion. The image we have of ourselves is just that, an image. Any word that we use to describe ourselves is not who we truly are, we transcend all of it and we are more than just the image.
The question then becomes, if everything we think about who we are is just an image, can it be replicated by a machine?
Then another question that few are asking:
If that isn't really who we are, does it even matter when it comes to the bigger existential questions? Will any of this technology get to the deeper questions that we as humans ask and the existential problems we struggle with? Will the technology just change the window dressing as that inner core of who we think we are struggles and suffers as it has for thousands of years?
Ultimately I think the materialists are right when it comes to technology's ability to turn most of what we think we are into computation (but I think they are wrong about the nature of reality and the existence of the soul)