Consciousness as a Necessary Scientific Tool

The title I wanted to give this was, Why Consciouness is a Necessary Tool in Creating a Greater Than Human Intelligence.

This is a follow-up to Flemming's most excellent post, Artificial or Natural Intelligences, and my earlier post Turning on Higher Intelligence.

I think the time has come to acknowledge that consciousness itself, our minds, and our innate intelligence, all of it, is as much an instrument of science as any instrument ever invented. More so in fact. In historical terms, now that we are on the verge of being able to engineer greater-than-human levels of intelligence, this acknowledgement could not come soon enough.

Like using a telescope to explore outerspace, our consciousness is our tool, our instrument to explore inner space. I find it odd then that Artificial Intelligence (AI) or Intelligence Augmentation (IA) researchers are trying to improve upon an instrument (the mind/brain) without actually using that very instrument (subjective experience) to determine how it works. This idea of reducing our understanding of the brain from the outside, examining its parts, neurons, glia cells and neurotransmitter functioning, without actually using the instrument itself seems disconcertingly inadequate. It would be like a sports fan telling a pro athelete how to play the sport better based on reading a book at the library, but without ever having played the sport themselves.

Oh sure, those who are working on Self-Augmenting Intelligence (SAI) are very smart, but they are only using one type of intelligence - their analytical, reasoning, "left brained" intelligence, which Timothy Leary called 3rd circuit intelligence. But complex behaviors like super-benevolent morality requires a great deal more than intellectual understandng, it requires a rich variety of situational and nuanced experience that can only come from a life fully lived. That means deep benevolent morality emerges from a wide variety of different intelligences, physical, emotional, intellectual and social. Eastern yogis would go further and say that a deep understanding of the mind and body from years of meditative work are also required to gain a deeper appreciation of benevolent compassion (Baraka). So how could some smart computer guys in a lab hope to emulate something even close to that?

I would argue that in order to create a more comprehensive understanding of intelligence, especially a greater-than-human level of intelligence requires both modes of examination and study to effectively improve upon it, because examining its parts in a reductionist fashion, tells us little of the emergent intelligence we each experience subjectively. Therefore, a genuine IA or AI research program should include both an objective and subjective framework. To me this is so obvious, that I think it's the main reason so many people overlook it. Arguments about the limits of the human mind, its culpability to logical fallacies such as availability bias, conjunction fallacy, Wason selection task, support theory, representativeness heuristic, misperception of random sequences, expert judgement and uncertainty, are all very important, but only a small part of the overall equation. All instruments have their limitations, including the human mind, but the human mind also has vast potential we've barely begun to understand or tap into. So lets not throw the baby out with the bathwater. For starters, a good scientific approach to inner exploration might be a good start.

In my opinion, the one person who has done more to map the furthest regions of innerspace in a rigorously scientific fashion is John Lilly, MD, Ph.D. John Lilly once said that, "Science is the Yoga of the West, and Yoga is the Science of the East". For those of you wanting to gain a deeper understanding of how the mind works from an experiential software context, rather than just an exclusively hardware context, should read his book Programming and Metaprogamming in the Human Biocomputer. Another excellent couple of books would be Robert Anton Wilson's Quantum Psychology: How Brain Software Programs You and Your World, and Prometheus Rising.

It is through this internal form of study, that we can determine, discover and access modes of knowledge and understanding of how human minds work, and in turn extrapolate how minds-in-general work, that could never be ascertained by reductionist means alone.

This field is wide open, so take your pick. My personal favorites at the moment are research into the interelationships between lucid dreams, out-of-body (OBE) and near-death experiences (NDE). I have been lucky enough to have had all three experiences - countless lucid dreams, two objectively verifiable OBE's and one NDE. Most often in my lucid dreams, I'm flying around with or without a body, doing impossibly fantastic, very pleasurable maneuvers, from floating in any angle, to jetting around like a UFO. Sometimes I'm flying around at 40mph over houses, futuristic buildings, and sometimes I'm flying thousands of miles an hour. And each and ever time it feels completely real, actually more than real.

Recently, I've also been having moments of what I like to call "waking lucidity". This is happening with increasing frequency. It's very similar to the blissful feeling of having a lucid dream while being awake. It feels amazing. Last time was a few weeks ago while I was driving to the airport. I felt very much the same as if I was in this really lucid dream, it was more real than real, and everything seemed more crisp, alive and joyful. I knew I was awake, but I was simultaneously experiencing the feeling I get while having a pleasurable lucid dream.

In the OBE's I've had, I was flying over my hometown. On two of these occasions I woke up right after the OBE ended (from my regular afternoon naps), and I ran out, got in my car, and drove to the place I flew to, and in my shock and amazement, I actually saw the same thing as in my OBE's - make/model/color of cars, people's faces in the park that matched(!), details like a crate leaning against one of the buildings. I was stunned. Up until that moment, I was skeptical about OBE's, thinking they were highly imaginary fabrications of the mind, now I'm much more open and excited about the possibilities.

For example, is waking life just another type of dream? Or are dreams another type of waking life? In the grander scheme of things, does it matter? Perhaps lucid dreams, OBE's, NDE's, etc. is our consciousness slowly evolving, opening up to a much greater, multi-dimensional, even infinite reality, of which our so-called "waking" life is just one limited way of experiencing it. Shamans, Yogi's, and Psychonauts over the ages have been telling us that we need to wake up from "normal" consciousness, which in their eyes is sleeping. The physicist David Bohm discussed something very similar with his ideas about an implicate order. In either case, I think this idea that there is an objective, reductionist materialist universe seperate from the observer is nonsense. Quantum mechanics supports the necessity of an observer.

Besides when you think about it, everything you know and experience intersects within your head. That would seem to render objective/subjective differences illusions of a primitive either/or aristotlean mind. I believe such differences are transcended through increasing perspective. Neither objective or subjective, but transjective. Another well-known John Lilly quote,

In the province of the mind, what the mind believes to be true, either is true or becomes true within certain limits to be found experientially and experimentally. These limits are further beliefs to be transcended. In the mind there are no limits.

Having said that I find it a bit dubious that the Singularity Institute is proposing to create an altogether "alien" mind that supercedes a human mind, and yet is supposed to have the human minds best interest at heart, while having no direct experiential knowledge of embodiment or the inner workings of our mind. Such knowledge as I have argued can only be ascertained by subjective exploration.

With the IA approach we are pursuing intelligence augmentation and self-fullment from within our own internally guided framework. We are in the best possible position to understand and direct it based on on our own inner knowledge, rather than being forceably programmed into something else by some alien intelligence thats germinated from scratch based on principles derived by AI scientists using a woefully lopsided reductionist model of the mind.

The remaining question is why does it have to be so alien? With a more comprehensive understanding of human contelligence (consciosuness + intelligence) that comes from deep and prolonged inner exploration and mastery - such as the super-benevolent yogi's, would come the answers to creating a super-benevolent SAI. What Greg Burch has called an Extrosattva. With the addition of a morality derived from a systemic embodied experience, such a being would possess a broad understanding of genuine compassion and benevolence, along with a deeb embodied understanding of humaness (necessary to help us), as well as not being prone to logical fallacies. In the light of all this, the idea of creating a competely de-anthropomorphized SAI is completely genocidal and fool hardy, as if we humans don't have anything worth contributing going forward in our evolution. I think the existence of super-benevolent yogis including the likes of people like Ghandi or the Dalai Lama prove otherwise.

Posted by paul at April 4, 2004 06:53 PM | TrackBack