14.1 AI on the Rise
291
“self-awareness”). I would need to have scientific and philosophical conversations
with the system, and it should not just reply to my questions and statements by trying
to find the best response in a huge database of human statements.
14.1.5 What Is Consciousness?
I sometimes speculate that our (3+1)-dimensional world might actually be an interpretation of higher-dimensional data (as elementary particle physics suggests as
well). Then, there could be different kinds of interpretations, i.e. different ways of
perceiving the world, depending on how we learn to perceive it. Imagine the brain
to work like a filter—and think of Plato’s allegory of the cave,
26 where people just
see two-dimensional shadows of a three-dimensional world and, hence, would find
very different “natural laws” governing what they see. What if our world was not
three-dimensional with changes in time, but if we would see only a three-dimensional
projection of a higher-dimensional world? Then, one day, we may start seeing the
world in an entirely different way,
27 for example, from the perspective of quantum
logic rather than binary logic. For such a transition in consciousness to take place,
we would probably have to learn to interpret weaker signals than what our five senses
send to our brain. Then, the permanent distractions by the attention economy would
just be the opposite of what would be needed to advance humanity.
Let me make this thought model a bit more plausible: Have you ever wondered
why Egyptian and ancient paintings used to look flat, i.e. two-dimensional, for
hundreds of years, while suddenly three-dimensionally looking perspective was
invented and became the new standard in art? What if ancient people have really seen
the world “with different eyes”? And what if this would happen again? Remember
that the invention of photography was not the end of paintings. Instead, this invention freed arts from naturalistic representation, and entirely new painting styles were
invented, such as impressionistic and expressionistic ones. Hence, will the creation
of humanoid robots finally free us from our mechanistic, materialistic view of the
world, as we learn how different we really are?
If we were not just “biological robots”, other fields besides science, engineering,
and logic would be a lot more important than some may think, such as psychology,
sociology, history, philosophy, the humanities, ethics, and maybe even religion.
Trying to reinvent society and humanity without the proper consideration of such
fields of knowledge could easily end in major mistakes of historical proportions.
26 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Allegory_of_the_Cave.
27 Mueller [5], Phil Ball [6].
291
“self-awareness”). I would need to have scientific and philosophical conversations
with the system, and it should not just reply to my questions and statements by trying
to find the best response in a huge database of human statements.
14.1.5 What Is Consciousness?
I sometimes speculate that our (3+1)-dimensional world might actually be an interpretation of higher-dimensional data (as elementary particle physics suggests as
well). Then, there could be different kinds of interpretations, i.e. different ways of
perceiving the world, depending on how we learn to perceive it. Imagine the brain
to work like a filter—and think of Plato’s allegory of the cave,
26 where people just
see two-dimensional shadows of a three-dimensional world and, hence, would find
very different “natural laws” governing what they see. What if our world was not
three-dimensional with changes in time, but if we would see only a three-dimensional
projection of a higher-dimensional world? Then, one day, we may start seeing the
world in an entirely different way,
27 for example, from the perspective of quantum
logic rather than binary logic. For such a transition in consciousness to take place,
we would probably have to learn to interpret weaker signals than what our five senses
send to our brain. Then, the permanent distractions by the attention economy would
just be the opposite of what would be needed to advance humanity.
Let me make this thought model a bit more plausible: Have you ever wondered
why Egyptian and ancient paintings used to look flat, i.e. two-dimensional, for
hundreds of years, while suddenly three-dimensionally looking perspective was
invented and became the new standard in art? What if ancient people have really seen
the world “with different eyes”? And what if this would happen again? Remember
that the invention of photography was not the end of paintings. Instead, this invention freed arts from naturalistic representation, and entirely new painting styles were
invented, such as impressionistic and expressionistic ones. Hence, will the creation
of humanoid robots finally free us from our mechanistic, materialistic view of the
world, as we learn how different we really are?
If we were not just “biological robots”, other fields besides science, engineering,
and logic would be a lot more important than some may think, such as psychology,
sociology, history, philosophy, the humanities, ethics, and maybe even religion.
Trying to reinvent society and humanity without the proper consideration of such
fields of knowledge could easily end in major mistakes of historical proportions.
26 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Allegory_of_the_Cave.
27 Mueller [5], Phil Ball [6].