Jonathan Österman wrote: ↑Sun Dec 03, 2023 5:07 pm
AshvinP wrote
:
" you then humorously illustrate why A.I. cannot possibly be or become sentient entities like humans at this stage "
At this stage ?
Ashvin, do you suppose that, in the future, there will be such stage that A.I. will become sentient and
conscious entities, like humans?
According to Dr.
Bernardo Kastrup, to suppose that
machine consciousness is possible, even in principle, is
sheer Lunacy. Would you dare to disagree with Dr.
Kastrup on his own discussion forum,
Ashvin?
Robert,
I disagree with Dr. Kastrup on many core things
within idealism. Particularly the fact that he views Earthly beings as isolated bubbles (or 'dissociated alters') existing on the periphery of MAL. We could represent it as follows. (I will relate this back to the question of AI at the end)
This whole circle represents the One Consciousness, with the white central circle as the creative core from which all the created worlds, planes, bodies, etc. radiate out. All of that simply represents the
depth of the meaningful context that structures our everyday thinking-perceptual experience. With BK's view, the thinking individual is understood as something like the black bubbles at the periphery. Our thoughts and perceptions are enclosed within this isolated bubble, whirlpool, or whatever metaphor is used (notice it becomes similar to materialism, in that sense). Somehow, those thoughts can be used to speculate on the depth structure extending to the creative MAL core, but they cannot grow to
experience the structure from its inner conscious dimension. If meditation is pursued in this view, its task is to dissolve the boundaries so that the bubble realizes itself as identical to the white central circle. Generally, the entire depth structure of concentric layers between the bubbles and the white center is simply ignored or understood as non-essential to enlightenment. We can explore these other realms of beings if we choose to, and maybe we will find more bubbles exist in those deeper layers, but their activity has little relevance to our essential nature. In this view, our thoughts and perceptions are like dream images with no clarifying capacity as to what lives in the deeper layers of our being. Our only hope of experiencing our true being is to mystically obliterate the dreamlike thoughts during life via meditation or to wait until after death when the boundaries dissolve on their own.
In contrast to that view, we can understand the thinking individual as a 'slice' of the
full depth spectrum at any given time. When we have thoughts about "forces", "fields", "energy", etc. or ideas of "family", "nation", etc. or ideals of "love", "generosity", etc. we are actually
living in and experiencing the deeper archetypal layers of the Divine Cosmos, except the experiences are ordinarily sucked into the formatting of the physical brain and sensory organism (the purple dashed line), which makes them appear dim and fragmented, isolated to our 'personal bubble' and 'subjective'. That appearance is Maya. Through higher development by means of concentration and other spiritual exercises, we can awaken through the 'life (etheric) body' where the experiences still live as holistic images full of vitality and feeling, before they are smashed into the physical sensory organism. The life body is like a 'wavefunction' of all our states of being over a given incarnation, and through the physical sensory organism it 'collapses' into our normal linear stream of experience. This is no abstract speculative model of reality, but rather these are concrete and practical insights we can gain through our first-person thinking experience as we expand cognition into the inner side of our soul life and the outer world.
The above also implies there are no fixed 'laws of reality', whether material or ideal, that we can extrapolate indefinitely into the past and future. If we define "machine consciousness" as the ability of mineral structures to become sentient
independently of any other beings, then of course, this isn't possible. But such a reality of bubble-beings simply doesn't exist, not for machines and not for plants, animals, or humans either. The reality is that our spirit incarnated and animated a mineral structure at the beginning of our lifetime on Earth and will leave that mineral structure to dissolve at death. The machines we create are
not the same as our physical bodies (they have not been fashioned by the life and soul processes like our bodies), so it would not be realistic to assume
human souls could incarnate into them. Whether other kinds of souls could incarnate into them at some future stage is a complicated question, and I really have no idea. But the point is that our understanding of reality becomes much more open, fluid, and imaginative when we begin to discern the depth structure of MAL and our concrete participation in that structure.