On AI And Consciousness by Ms Caitlin Johnstone!
(2025-04-20 at 15:56:03 )

On AI And Consciousness by Ms Caitlin Johnstone!

Listen to a reading of this article (reading by Tim Foley):

AI is not conscious. Saying AI should replace humanity is the same as saying fire should replace humanity, or white noise static from old televisions should replace humanity.

Computer scientist and futurist Jaron Lanier made some comments on Voxs The Gray Area podcast the other day that I would like to make a quick observation about.

In the podcast, titled "Will AI become God? That is the wrong question," Lanier talks about how artificial "intelligence" has become a sort of quasi religion in Silicon Valley, complete with its own deity-like entity, and a kind of Armageddon-cult-like vision for our future.

Asked by host Sean Illing about peoples anxiety regarding AI and the possibility of human extinction, Lanier said many in Silicon Valley have come to view humanity as a mere birthing vessel for these new technologies, which will become our vastly superior replacement.

"What drives me crazy about this is that this is my world," Lanier said. "I talk to the people who believe that stuff all the time, and increasingly, a lot of them believe that it would be good to wipe out people and that the AI future would be a better one, and that we should wear a disposable temporary container for the birth of AI. I hear that opinion quite a lot."

"Wait, that is a real opinion held by real people?" asked Illing.

"Many, many people," Lanier replied.

Tech pioneer Jaron Lanier argues for a different way to think about AI.
"please see here:" - Vox (voxdotcom) April 7, 2025

This is obviously disturbing, but it is also just plain bizarre, because it shows how little attention these people are paying to the phenomenon of consciousness.

AI is not conscious. Saying AI should replace humanity is the same as saying fire should replace humanity, or white noise static from old televisions should replace humanity. It is not conscious. There is nobody inside it. It is just the dark, empty buzzing of machinery, unwitnessed and unexperienced by any perceiving being.

It says so much about the worldview of these weird Silicon Valley cultists that this is not obvious to them. They think AI would be a superior replacement for humanity because they have paid no attention to consciousness. They have paid no attention to consciousness because they have lived completely unexamined lives. They have never reflected on what it actually means to be a living being having sentient experiences in this world.

Consciousness means subjective experience. It is the hearer of what is heard, the seer of what is seen, and the perceiver of thoughts. We can know consciousness exists by our own experience of it, and we can infer that other people and animals must also have it because they have so many similarities to us. There is absolutely no reason to assume that inanimate, inorganic matter is capable of consciousness besides blind faith religious belief.

You see this with the way many of these cultists say people will be able to one day achieve immortality by uploading their minds onto computers. Julian Assange has talked about this Silicon Valley religious belief in the past, saying the following at a 2017 video conference:

"I know from our sources deep inside those Silicon Valley institutions, they genuinely believe that they are going to produce artificial intelligences that are so powerful, relatively soon, that people will have their brains digitized, uploaded on these artificial intelligences, and live forever in a simulation, therefore will have eternal life. It is a religion for atheists. They will have eternal life, and given that you are in a simulation, why not program the simulation to have endless drug and sex orgy parties all around you. It is like the 72 virgins, but it is like the Silicon Valley equivalent."

Computers are not conscious. Sure you might one day be able to replicate the contents of a human mind onto some sort of software, but it will not be "you", because it will not be conscious. There would be nobody experiencing it. It would just be ones and zeros, unilluminated by any perceiving awareness.

Consciousness is the only reason life has value. It is the only reason anything matters. Otherwise life would just be physical materials getting whipped about by natural forces without anyone feeling, sensing or experiencing any part of it.

Suffering would not matter because it is not being felt or experienced.

Joy would not matter because it is not being felt or experienced.

There would be no good reason not to torture someone, because there would not be any conscious experience of pain.

There would be no good reason to love anyone, because there would not be any conscious experience of love.

Consciousness is the only reason life is worth living.

There is no basis on which to believe AI will ever be conscious.

Consciousness is not some minor detail that science will easily work out once it gets around to it; it is an all-encompassing phenomenon which has always been a complete mystery to all scientific fields.

Science has no idea what consciousness is or why it happens, much less how to replicate it.

It is the single most important and fundamental aspect of every second of our waking experience of life, yet it remains a complete unknown to all of science. And this somehow gets left out of so much of the conversation about the future of artificial "intelligence".

I guess it is possible to become so mind-identified that you really believe you are your thoughts, and that a machine which can generate digital "thoughts" much more efficiently would therefore be a superior sort of being.

You have to have spent no time looking inward and examining what it is that is able to perceive thoughts in the first place. You have to have spent no time in meditation decoupling your sense of identity from the chatter in your head. You must be completely asleep at the wheel of your own life.

These are people who have spent their entire lives listening to their thoughts, without ever once taking a moment to wonder who the listener is.

And these are the people who increasingly rule our world. These are the people inserting themselves into our political systems. These are the people deciding what we may and may not say to each other online. These are the people setting the trajectory for the future of our species. These weird little cultists who are so pervasively unaware of their own inner processes that consciousness does not even feature in their understanding of what life is and where it is headed.

Just something we should all be aware of!!!

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Ah, the Buddha Ms Caitlin speaks the truth!!! - Cousin Lucky