Putting the Fire into the Equation: consciousness is fundamental? Universal?

Boudhanath Stupa, Kathmandu, Nepal, public domain

As I have frequently asserted in this blog already, while it is tempting when discussing artificial super intelligence (ASI) to move more to a discussion of Moore's Law and raw processing power and the exponential s-curve of technological development, etc. (the sort of things we can more easily understand), the hard problem of consciousness is necessarily a pre-requisite challenge that must be met before further progress is achieved, or even seriously attempted. I risk testing your patience in my repetition of this assertion because I believe that missing this challenge and not meeting it would offer the greatest threat to the success of the effort as well as the greatest risk that what may be created in our attempts with a lack of understanding about this most critical problem will not be what we intend, with disastrous consequence.

In not understanding the ultimate source of consciousness, what factors together create it and/or what factors in our physical realm come together to channel it, limit, or focus it, it seems there are only two possible outcomes to our quest for artificial super intelligence (ASI): we fail, miserably, or we succeed at creating something, but not what we intend. The liklihood that we will achieve what we intend without understanding how exactly what we are trying to achieve works seems remote, at best, no matter how good a job our attempts at physical mimicry of the material structures might be. To take only the one alternative model for consciousness here presented, and to oversimplify it greatly, if we were to reverse engineer a television set for instance, without understanding anything of the science of the transmissions it receives, nor the television station which transmits the signals, nor the power source, nor voltage required to initiate and maintain the reception of the transmission, etc., it seems unlikely we'd end up with a working television on our hands. With ASI, the added threat of failure is not just a lack of success, but the accidental creation of something that we didn't intend, something powerfully (beyond our measure) malevolent vis a vis us, instead of benevolent vis a vis us, since the question of willful subjective experience and self-consciousness is invoked immediately by the quest for - and even the possiblity of - ASI in the first place. Not even the extreme materialists would deny this danger.

And so I will continue to spend time on what seems to me to be foundational to the quest for ASI. If there is a moderate in these discussions, someone who takes the materialist presupposition seriously as well as its alternatives, it might be David Chalmers, a professor of philosophy and the director of the Centre for Consciousness at the Australian National University. He takes Dan Dennett's idea that consciousness is an illusion to be in common cause with his own (and others')  "crazy ideas" that might expand or replace our current paradigm and that are required to crack the hard problem of consciousness: that consciousness may be fundamental and/or that it might be universal. If we are to gain a sufficiently robust understanding of consciousness to even seriously attempt to develop and create artificial super intelligence, Chalmers is among those I think might have the best chance at pulling it off, with just enough openness to ideas outside of our current paradigms but with the sort of level-headed even-handedness and respect for the current paradigm that takes seriously that paradigm's enormous and very much established explanatory success in helping us understand our physical universe.

Without further delay, here's a good introduction to Chalmer's attempts at exploring the hard problem of consciousness and what he believes may be necessary to solve it: