God, Gravity, and Consciousness
I have been thinking for over a decade and a half on the moral status of AI and what makes humans unique when compared with AI. I have written on this extensively and recently refused the interview process for Anthropic for a research position. I am currently leading a research effort to determine the differences, which is the goal of the GATE Program:
This so-called "spark or humanity" that folks are looking for has a clear basis in physics - the way in which the brain works is different, and distinguishes the way in which people interact and how they interact with AIs, which is central to the business model of AI, which is credit assignment. When people interact socially, hyperscanning studies show interbrain synchrony, and synchrony of heartbeats, and this corresponds with learning in classrooms, social adjustment, performance in teams, and collective effervescence in collective activities like concerts. AI is a mass surveillance ourborus and fundamentally a tool of financial engineering to compress, flatten, and digitize human interactions, and then sell them back at a price. Rather than building local communities which buffer the complex demands of a late stage society, the illusion of community can be produced by AI tools - that is its primary danger - it is a large mirror held up to society that alienates people from one another designed to prop up a society, that sacrifices change for continuity.
The brain implements the equivalent of backpropagation (or credit assignment) at 20 watts, while these datacenters and GPU clusters are now requiring their own nuclear power plants - a hint that the physics is different. Credit assignment must be gated in order to maintain the business model for AI, in order to digitize and monetize it, which is also what makes it inefficient and different than the way in which humans connect. Sam Altman recently claimed that it was a good idea to replace people with datacenters because it expends less energy to have a data center than to raise people to the age of 20. This is the primary goal of AI as a tool of financial engineering:
The fact is that AI is currently being used to prop up the economy. As a society ages, it becomes more complex to prop up institutional stability. In order to stabilize institutions like financial institutions, AI ("AGI") is the "god of the gaps" solution that is presented. According to Joseph Tainter in his book "The Collapse of Complex Societies," these feedback loop solutions like mass surveillance (as in surveillance neoliberal capitalism) in societies reach a point of diminishing returns until societies collapse and devolve into anarchy or imperialist wars of expansion. As children introduce chaos into society, a society that gates access to resources and becomes too rigid and complex to navigate also as a consequence introduces too much socioeconomic anxiety, where (young) people are more likely to opt out of having children:
What Happens to the Right/Left Political Spectrum at Catastrophe Points in SocioEconoPhysics Theory?
It has been quite frustrating that there are clear differences between the way in which the brain works when compared to AI which are at the heart of the AI business model that separate it, and yet very few people are looking into this.
I think that it is important to be having these philosophical discussions and I want to address some comments here, based on a discussion from Catholic theologian Dr. Comosy that I saw, and I understand that in Catholic theology there is a difference between the physical and metaphysical, and therefore categorically the human spirit would have a metaphysical component which is eternally separable from the physical substrate of the body, which is also represented in the Holy Trinity with the Holy Spirit within Catholicism.
While it is true that consciousness "exists outside of the brain" I want to offer a more precise examination of what that exactly means. You have a similar duality in science:
In a 1975 paper with Basil Hiley, David Bohm wrote that "the inseparable quantum interconnectedness of the whole universe is the fundamental reality." He spent much of his later career on this idea, and in his book Wholeness and the Implicate Order (1980).
This idea that the whole is more than a sum of its parts and that its interactions with the rest of the universe in part define it is similar in principle to what they getting at. In fact, collective intelligence in groups of people scales faster than intelligence isolated in people, which demonstrates this difference.
The clearest Catholic statement I could find is Pope Francis's 2015 encyclical Laudato Si', which repeats the line "everything is connected" throughout. The idea is that the brain tissue in itself does not fully define it, whereas its spirit is defined through its entanglements and interactions with the entire universe and can even transcend the death of the tissue in its influence.
In physics I will look at this through the lens of sociophysics, econophysics, and quantum physics, which is similar to metaphysics in that there is a duality between the material world of classical physics and the "spiritual" world (like the Descartes duality between "body" and "mind") which behaves much differently (particles popping in and out of existence, particles appearing in multiple places at once, etcetera). In fact you can see that human behavior follows interference patterns and quantum decision trees rather than what you would expect to see from a classical computer.
Sir Isaac Newton's conception of God is often misunderstood to be deistic, like a clock maker that sets the deterministic universe into motion, but in actuality his idea was that God was a force that would periodically interfere in the universe to keep it in order, and that God manifests in the universe through the force of gravity. The reason that this is important is because according to Dr. Penrose, the way in which the brain achieves perceptual binding is through gravitational collapse of evolving ("orchestrated") wavefunctions in brain tissue (which is an NP-hard problem and cannot be replicated by quantum or classical computers, though some have suggested otherwise in ways I find inconvincing) is tied to gravity (Orch-Or theory).
But since gravity is a force that keeps galaxies together, and is only weakly felt within neurons, how could it possibly be implicated in consciousness? Well, gravity itself is thought to be a thermodynamic or entropic force. While gravity (or the behavior of the fabric of spacetime) plays the role of keeping the universe in order, at smaller scales it establishes limits of entropy (chaos) that a region of spacetime can inhabit - so its role is less in its place as a force and more in that saturates a complexity bound, beyond which an OR event is triggered, which becomes the clock "tick" in our conscious experience, like frames in a movie.
While quantum physics represents the behavior of particles at small scales, and general relativity represents the behavior of objects at larger scales, gravity sits at the intersection with macroscopic quantumlike effects and conformal fractals across scales (for example, through the study of quantum chaos in my discussion with Ed Witten).
We are exploring this through the GATE Program in coordination with Oxford University, SDSU, LLNL, and SJSU, and understanding this physics can also explain avian magnetoreception, which we are exploring with Project BLUEBIRD:
Rather than a financial bubble, AGI is a moving goalpost designed as a black hole designed to digitize and monetize all aspects of human relationships, and absorb all the capital in an economy, starving out and outcrowding the agency of the host population. AI fracks and flattens social capital, stealing ideas, and then sells them back to the population at a price. What the AI does in organizing information can be credited to investors, and where it fails or produces harm, the companies can evade accountability and claim that the AI has "broken out" and has a mind of its own (a lie). Like a black hole, the AI bubble is designed with circular financing such that all capital flows through a number of key players - much like you might consider all light geodesics terminating at the same singularity trapped by gravity.
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