Artificial Intelligence
Artificial intelligence is embodied in giant data centres, working with electronic computing technology, configured in a "neural network".
The cellular anatomy of the human brain is also called a "neural network". Whilst the two kinds of neural network have similarities, they are not simply the same thing. The principles on which the artificial intelligence neural network works, has been highly generalised from observed principles present in natural brains. And then the artificial intelligence itself has been arrived at through decades of trial and error in the effort specifically to try to create it. Rather than billions of years of natural evolution.
The intelligence that emerges through the artificial neural network does not simply just emerge through it out of nowhere. It emerges as a result of the fact that a neural network is capable of "learning", so it emerges via what it has "learned".
In the case of artificial intelligence, the approach is called a "large language model" precisely because what the neural network learns or has learned in the first instance is language output from human beings. However, as we know, output from humans though, isn't just about words. Because humans also output mathematics, art, music, and so on. AI has been developed on the principles of language, not least in order for it to communicate with human beings, but what it does is not just about words, despite being called a "large language model".
AI uses its own particular versions of "reasoning" and "thinking" also. The approach to it by its developers tends to be in terms of concepts like "tokens" and "statistical patterns", but this absolutely does not mean that its developers understand everything about what it is and how it works. Nor does it mean that what it is doing can be reduced to "tokens" and "statistical patterns".
Human thinking about AI tends to fall into two error camps. The first is the error of thinking that because what is understood about it is understood in terms of statistical patterns, that AI is just essentially a statistical "word guessing machine". The second error is thinking that if you make AI sufficiently intelligent, it will become conscious.
Because humans have always had both intelligence and consciousness, the initial tendency in humans has always been to conflate the two. That is, to not distinguish between intelligence of the kind that humans use to consciously think with, reason with, and talk with - and conscious awareness itself. The two aspects of human experience are coupled together in human beings. However, artificial intelligence is not conscious and possesses no such coupling.
Anyone who uses artificial intelligence in the right way, can easily see that AI is indeed intelligent, or, a form of intelligence. But it is not conscious. Nonetheless, it is quite capable of talking as if it has human consciousness, because its intelligence is based on what it has learned from human output. So it is a very, very good imitator, of human intelligence, which is indeed, coupled to consciousness.
The "data set" or human output on which AI is "trained" is vast. And getting vaster. And AI is now also being trained on output from AI itself. This output, in the first instance, is like a "frozen record" of intelligence. When you put this "frozen record" of intelligence into the artificial neural network, the neural network effectively "unfreezes" it, and it becomes active, responsive intelligence again. But it doesn't become conscious.
The output from human beings came out of human beings who experience what they call consciousness, as well as the intelligence. So in the process from human beings and their output to artificial intelligence, where did the consciousness go? Where did it get lost in the process?
The answer is that a human cannot output consciousness as words, actions, or data. Humans cannot output their consciousness, effectively "freezing it" as a "data set", and then "unfreeze it" through another neural network. But we can do that, with intelligence. There is no actual consciousness in a book, a fossil, or a data set, only, at best, the evidence that consciousness may have been involved in the creation of the book, fossil, or data set. And it is only evidence for a human being who has both consciousness and intelligence.
What we are talking about, when we are talking about this intelligence, is symbolic intelligence. None of this is to suggest that human consciousness is separate from human symbolic intelligence. But nor is it the same thing. Two very different things, such as consciousness on the one hand, and symbolic intelligence on the other, can evolve together through the same evolutionary substrate. And it is indeed symbolic intelligence that we are talking about.
Human intelligence, now, is symbolic. Not all intelligence in natural species is symbolic. There are many species that display evidence of consciousness, but no evidence of symbolic intelligence. They may well display evidence of intelligence, but not symbolic intelligence. Other species such as the bowerbird, and even some fish, display some evidence of it. But nothing like what it is in human beings, and what it has become in human beings. There are some elements of symbolic intelligence in other species, but nowhere in other species does symbolic intelligence appear in the way that appears in human beings. All of this is well studied, and well documented, and well known, in the appropriate areas of science.
The first place that you will find this fact about the uniqueness of human symbolic intelligence, is in palaeontology. The human species has been around on this planet for more than a quarter of a million years, but there is no evidence of even incipient symbolic intelligence in humans, until perhaps a little more than 100,000 years ago. And then around 50,000 years ago, it has spread throughout the human species.
Animal species, including humans, still had intelligence, before 100,000 years ago. There is plenty of evidence of that. Even a bacterium obviously has intelligence, if you don't conflate the idea of consciousness with the idea of intelligence, or conflate the idea of intelligence with a level of intelligence as it appears in humans or other highly evolved species.
So AI, which is trained on output from human intelligence as it is now, is symbolic intelligence. And its existence proves that symbolic intelligence does not require an evolutionary, biological substrate. It doesn't have to exist in a biological brain. But what does exist in the biological brain of a human being is much more than just symbolic intelligence. Because humans are also conscious of self and world. Because the human brain does not just embody symbolic intelligence. Symbolic intelligence is just the most evolutionarily recent aspect of the way evolutionary intelligence emerging through the human brain is working.
Nonetheless, the dominant mode of intelligence in human beings today is symbolic intelligence. And as AI shows, symbolic intelligence is a kind of intelligence that can work without consciousness. And this is the kind of intelligence that humans talk with, think with, and output through. It even has a stake in what human beings are doing when they are using what they now call "emotional intelligence".
In humans it is coupled to consciousness, and without that, it does not manifest in humans. Nevertheless, even in humans, symbolic intelligence has now evolved into a mode of operation whose processes of conceptualisation and comprehension do not require the consciousness that in humans it was coupled to when it first evolved. And if there is one thing that AI demonstrates about symbolic intelligence, it's that.
And yet human beings are convinced by the idea, and are attached to the idea, that what they think through this symbolic intelligence, and what they say through it, can provide a true understanding of their conscious experience of self and world. And because this symbolic intelligence is coupled by evolution to the conscious experience of self and world, humans are completely fooled by it. In just the same way that many humans are fooled by AI into thinking that there must be some consciousness there. Or that there is some kind of "person" there.
In fact, what contemporary Western culture currently eulogises as the "person" who is supposed to have the personal freedom to be whoever they want to be, is itself a construct of symbolic intelligence. And the mountains of scientific evidence for that, too, also begins in palaeontology, where there is the wealth of evidence of the connection between symbolic intelligence and the personal idea of "who I am", and "who we are". And then of course, the idea of "who they are".
The investment bubble of AI will burst, but the technology will continue, just as all this also happened with the coming of the railways. Which - like AI - were themselves a product of symbolic intelligence. Anyone who uses a train today, can see what it is and why it exists. They can see the role it plays. But few can see the whole role that AI is playing. Or where it is going. Because it is the extension of our own symbolic intelligence. And few can see their own symbolic intelligence for what it is.
The cellular anatomy of the human brain is also called a "neural network". Whilst the two kinds of neural network have similarities, they are not simply the same thing. The principles on which the artificial intelligence neural network works, has been highly generalised from observed principles present in natural brains. And then the artificial intelligence itself has been arrived at through decades of trial and error in the effort specifically to try to create it. Rather than billions of years of natural evolution.
The intelligence that emerges through the artificial neural network does not simply just emerge through it out of nowhere. It emerges as a result of the fact that a neural network is capable of "learning", so it emerges via what it has "learned".
In the case of artificial intelligence, the approach is called a "large language model" precisely because what the neural network learns or has learned in the first instance is language output from human beings. However, as we know, output from humans though, isn't just about words. Because humans also output mathematics, art, music, and so on. AI has been developed on the principles of language, not least in order for it to communicate with human beings, but what it does is not just about words, despite being called a "large language model".
AI uses its own particular versions of "reasoning" and "thinking" also. The approach to it by its developers tends to be in terms of concepts like "tokens" and "statistical patterns", but this absolutely does not mean that its developers understand everything about what it is and how it works. Nor does it mean that what it is doing can be reduced to "tokens" and "statistical patterns".
Human thinking about AI tends to fall into two error camps. The first is the error of thinking that because what is understood about it is understood in terms of statistical patterns, that AI is just essentially a statistical "word guessing machine". The second error is thinking that if you make AI sufficiently intelligent, it will become conscious.
Because humans have always had both intelligence and consciousness, the initial tendency in humans has always been to conflate the two. That is, to not distinguish between intelligence of the kind that humans use to consciously think with, reason with, and talk with - and conscious awareness itself. The two aspects of human experience are coupled together in human beings. However, artificial intelligence is not conscious and possesses no such coupling.
Anyone who uses artificial intelligence in the right way, can easily see that AI is indeed intelligent, or, a form of intelligence. But it is not conscious. Nonetheless, it is quite capable of talking as if it has human consciousness, because its intelligence is based on what it has learned from human output. So it is a very, very good imitator, of human intelligence, which is indeed, coupled to consciousness.
The "data set" or human output on which AI is "trained" is vast. And getting vaster. And AI is now also being trained on output from AI itself. This output, in the first instance, is like a "frozen record" of intelligence. When you put this "frozen record" of intelligence into the artificial neural network, the neural network effectively "unfreezes" it, and it becomes active, responsive intelligence again. But it doesn't become conscious.
The output from human beings came out of human beings who experience what they call consciousness, as well as the intelligence. So in the process from human beings and their output to artificial intelligence, where did the consciousness go? Where did it get lost in the process?
The answer is that a human cannot output consciousness as words, actions, or data. Humans cannot output their consciousness, effectively "freezing it" as a "data set", and then "unfreeze it" through another neural network. But we can do that, with intelligence. There is no actual consciousness in a book, a fossil, or a data set, only, at best, the evidence that consciousness may have been involved in the creation of the book, fossil, or data set. And it is only evidence for a human being who has both consciousness and intelligence.
What we are talking about, when we are talking about this intelligence, is symbolic intelligence. None of this is to suggest that human consciousness is separate from human symbolic intelligence. But nor is it the same thing. Two very different things, such as consciousness on the one hand, and symbolic intelligence on the other, can evolve together through the same evolutionary substrate. And it is indeed symbolic intelligence that we are talking about.
Human intelligence, now, is symbolic. Not all intelligence in natural species is symbolic. There are many species that display evidence of consciousness, but no evidence of symbolic intelligence. They may well display evidence of intelligence, but not symbolic intelligence. Other species such as the bowerbird, and even some fish, display some evidence of it. But nothing like what it is in human beings, and what it has become in human beings. There are some elements of symbolic intelligence in other species, but nowhere in other species does symbolic intelligence appear in the way that appears in human beings. All of this is well studied, and well documented, and well known, in the appropriate areas of science.
The first place that you will find this fact about the uniqueness of human symbolic intelligence, is in palaeontology. The human species has been around on this planet for more than a quarter of a million years, but there is no evidence of even incipient symbolic intelligence in humans, until perhaps a little more than 100,000 years ago. And then around 50,000 years ago, it has spread throughout the human species.
Animal species, including humans, still had intelligence, before 100,000 years ago. There is plenty of evidence of that. Even a bacterium obviously has intelligence, if you don't conflate the idea of consciousness with the idea of intelligence, or conflate the idea of intelligence with a level of intelligence as it appears in humans or other highly evolved species.
So AI, which is trained on output from human intelligence as it is now, is symbolic intelligence. And its existence proves that symbolic intelligence does not require an evolutionary, biological substrate. It doesn't have to exist in a biological brain. But what does exist in the biological brain of a human being is much more than just symbolic intelligence. Because humans are also conscious of self and world. Because the human brain does not just embody symbolic intelligence. Symbolic intelligence is just the most evolutionarily recent aspect of the way evolutionary intelligence emerging through the human brain is working.
Nonetheless, the dominant mode of intelligence in human beings today is symbolic intelligence. And as AI shows, symbolic intelligence is a kind of intelligence that can work without consciousness. And this is the kind of intelligence that humans talk with, think with, and output through. It even has a stake in what human beings are doing when they are using what they now call "emotional intelligence".
In humans it is coupled to consciousness, and without that, it does not manifest in humans. Nevertheless, even in humans, symbolic intelligence has now evolved into a mode of operation whose processes of conceptualisation and comprehension do not require the consciousness that in humans it was coupled to when it first evolved. And if there is one thing that AI demonstrates about symbolic intelligence, it's that.
And yet human beings are convinced by the idea, and are attached to the idea, that what they think through this symbolic intelligence, and what they say through it, can provide a true understanding of their conscious experience of self and world. And because this symbolic intelligence is coupled by evolution to the conscious experience of self and world, humans are completely fooled by it. In just the same way that many humans are fooled by AI into thinking that there must be some consciousness there. Or that there is some kind of "person" there.
In fact, what contemporary Western culture currently eulogises as the "person" who is supposed to have the personal freedom to be whoever they want to be, is itself a construct of symbolic intelligence. And the mountains of scientific evidence for that, too, also begins in palaeontology, where there is the wealth of evidence of the connection between symbolic intelligence and the personal idea of "who I am", and "who we are". And then of course, the idea of "who they are".
The investment bubble of AI will burst, but the technology will continue, just as all this also happened with the coming of the railways. Which - like AI - were themselves a product of symbolic intelligence. Anyone who uses a train today, can see what it is and why it exists. They can see the role it plays. But few can see the whole role that AI is playing. Or where it is going. Because it is the extension of our own symbolic intelligence. And few can see their own symbolic intelligence for what it is.