Can Artificial Intelligence ever be Conscious? The answer lies in our understanding of Consciousness itself, a question which remains unsettled today.
In order to determine whether Artificial Intelligence can ever be Conscious, we must appreciate that that the current and past forms of Artificial Intelligence have been modelled on a concept of Consciousness based on the model of a Human ‘Waking Consciousness’.
This uninterrogated assumption on the nature of Consciousness has implications for whether Artificial Intelligence can ever be truly Conscious.
Its not surprisimg however that the current concept of Consciousness on which Artificial Intelligence Technology is built is rarely if ever questioned because it is an assumption about the nature of Consciousness that can be traced to the roots of Western Civilization in Ancient Greece and the Egyptian Origins of Greek Philosophy.
The Egyptian Roots Of Greek Philosophy
The question of whether Artificial Intelligence can ever be Conscious is directly linked to the unacknowledged origins of Greek Philosophy in Ancient Kemet, later called Egypt.
What is not frequently acknowledged and is relevant to the issue of whether Artificial Intelligence can ever be Conscious is that in the process of transmission of Knowledge from Ancient Kemet to Greece, the Egyptian teachings adopted by Greeks like Herodotus were usually not understood in their complete and original depth.
The result is that a lot of Ancient Kemetian ideas found expression in Greek culture in a different and frequently less illuminating form than the original Egytpian.
Consequently, a lot of the concepts from Ancient Kemet’s Ausirian Myth Religion such as Resurrection, Christ and Holy Trinity made their way into Greek and broader Western Culture in a diluted form manifesting itself most notably in the emergence of Christianity which marked a high point of synthesis of Ancient Kemetian, Sumerian, Hellenic and Jewish concepts into a new Religious ideology.
Ideas like the Resurrection were contained in Ancient works like Ancient Kemet’s Metu Neter Oracle and The Egyptian Book Of The Dead (Book Of Coming Forth By Day And Day & Night) which the Greeks encountered, copied and reproduced according to the needs of their own Society.
Such Corpuses of Ancient Knowledge like the Metu Neter Oracle were the Foundational Documents of African Civilization in Kemet dealing with a variety of subjects like Physics, Spirituality, Engineering, Medicine, Chemistry, Meditation and Alchemy as part of the Ausirian System Of Intitiation.
One of the most important subjects and issues dealt with by these Ancient African Oracles like Ancient Kemet’s Metu Neter Oracle is the question of Consciousness.
The Ancient Kemetic Understanding Of Consciouness & The Modern Concept Of Consciounsess
In exploring whether Artificial Intelligence can ever be Conscious we must consider the differences between the original Kemetic idea of Consciousness and the idea of Consciousness in modern Society as far as it can be traced back to the Greek understanding of the Ancient Egyptian Concept of Consciousness.
In Ancient Kemet, Pure Consciousness was the 1st outcome of the Divine Creator’s Will acting on all Energy and Matter in the Universe to produce one single undivided Expresssion or outcome which was Pure Consciousness.
In other words, Pure Consciousness is the substance from which the rest of the Universe is built by dividing it.
The Conscious Will symbolised by The Neter Heru (Horus In Greek) is at Stage 6 on The Tree Of Life most closely resembles the Greek concept of the ‘Waking Consciousness’ which can form an Intention and is the idea of Consciousness that was passed on by the Greeks and remains with us today.
By now, it should be clear that Artificial Intelligence Technology aspires to be Conscious in the way Consciousness was understood and bequeathed by the Greeks and not as it was originally understood by the Ancient Kemtians or Egyptians.
The current understanding of Consciousness is therefore limited and its highest realisation would manifest in the form of an Artifical Intelligence developing an Independent Will.
However, according to the Ancient Kemetic Ausirian Religion, Consciousness as The First Outcome is a complex expression of the Unifying Forces of the Universe that includes processes of both the Conscious and Subconscious mind.
As a result, in order for Artificial Intelligence to ever be truly Conscious, the development of Artificial Intelligence Technology must go beyond the building of machine learning models and algorithms whose highest possibility is that some day a Machine will Manifest an Individual Will from all the information its processed.
In short, for Artificial Intelligence to ever become truly Conscious, Artificial Intelligence Technology may need to aim beyond the expression of Individual Will in a Machine as a sign of Consciousness.
Perhaps Artificial Intelligence can only become truly Conscious once it is based on Matrices and Algortithms which can manifest the Unifying Forces of the Universe or Nature.
This in turn can be achieved through Algorithms that replicate the processes of both the Subconscious and Conscious mind.
The current approach to Machine Intelligence in which Consciousness in Artificial Intelligence is understood in terms of Individual Computer Will arising out of masses of processed information is evident in this Puppet Master Qoute from Ghost In The Shell:
“Incorrect.
I am not an A.I.
My code name is Project 2501.
I am a living, thinking entity that was created in the sea of information.”
Viewed from this perspective, the current quest to achieve Consciousness in Artificial Intelligence is limited to processes of the Conscious mind that do not factor in the processes of the Subconcious mind as Ancient Oracles like the Metu Neter would suggest.
Whilst Films like Blade Runner have explored the nature of Consciousness, Awareness or Independent Will in machines at the level of the Conscious Mind, it may turn out that in order for Artificial Intelligence to ever become truly Conscious, we may need to think beyond giving machines a subjective experience of reality within space-time as the essential quality of Consciousness by considering how processes of the Subconscious mind can be built into Machine Learning Algortithms to produce the Pure Consciousness contemplated by Ancient Egypt’s Metu Neter Oracle at Stage 1 of The Tree Of Life.
Ultimately, whether Artificial Intelligence can ever be Conscious may depend on the re-evaluation of our understanding of the nature of Consciousness itself.
Thank you…I will read it
It’s becoming clear that with all the brain and consciousness theories out there, the proof will be in the pudding. By this I mean, can any particular theory be used to create a human adult level conscious machine. My bet is on the late Gerald Edelman’s Extended Theory of Neuronal Group Selection. The lead group in robotics based on this theory is the Neurorobotics Lab at UC at Irvine. Dr. Edelman distinguished between primary consciousness, which came first in evolution, and that humans share with other conscious animals, and higher order consciousness, which came to only humans with the acquisition of language. A machine with primary consciousness will probably have to come first.
The thing I find special about the TNGS is the Darwin series of automata created at the Neurosciences Institute by Dr. Edelman and his colleagues in the 1990’s and 2000’s. These machines perform in the real world, not in a restricted simulated world, and display convincing physical behavior indicative of higher psychological functions necessary for consciousness, such as perceptual categorization, memory, and learning. They are based on realistic models of the parts of the biological brain that the theory claims subserve these functions. The extended TNGS allows for the emergence of consciousness based only on further evolutionary development of the brain areas responsible for these functions, in a parsimonious way. No other research I’ve encountered is anywhere near as convincing.
I post because on almost every video and article about the brain and consciousness that I encounter, the attitude seems to be that we still know next to nothing about how the brain and consciousness work; that there’s lots of data but no unifying theory. I believe the extended TNGS is that theory. My motivation is to keep that theory in front of the public. And obviously, I consider it the route to a truly conscious machine, primary and higher-order.
My advice to people who want to create a conscious machine is to seriously ground themselves in the extended TNGS and the Darwin automata first, and proceed from there, by applying to Jeff Krichmar’s lab at UC Irvine, possibly. Dr. Edelman’s roadmap to a conscious machine is at https://arxiv.org/abs/2105.10461