AI and the General Formation of Consciousness

What impact does artificial intelligence have on the evolution of consciousness, and could it mark the beginning of a new form of awareness beyond the human?

Stefan Brunnhuber of the World Academy of Art and Science explores how AI, as a transformative technology, reshapes not only society but the filters through which we perceive modern life — bridging biology, cognition, and cosmic consciousness.

Visit the World Academy of Art and Science website: worldacademy.org

Read more: amazon.co.uk/Stefan-Brunnhuber

Transcript

Hello and welcome to Research Pod! Thank you for listening and joining us today. 

In this episode, we look at the research of Stefan Brunnhuber, trustee of the World Academy of Art and Science and member of the Club of Rome. Central to his research lies the question: what is the impact of AI on the formation of consciousness? 

Historically, technological evolution has always been intertwined with human development. We can even go so far as to say that technologies are ideas - born of human ingenuity - made material in the real world. That’s true of learning to make fire, it’s true of the plough, the printing press, electricity and the steam engine, and it’s now true of AI, synthetic biology, robotics and quantum computing. These new technologies add another layer to our co-evolution. This co-evolution is leading to a constant, ever-expanding development leading to a higher, more holistic human consciousness. 

AI is currently considered to be a general-purpose technology, like the plough, the steam engine or electricity, but it involves several elements that are different to any previous general-purpose technology. 

First, AI blurs the boundaries between the biological and online worlds, between the physical and the conceptual, and second, helps to realise the interconnectedness  of everything everywhere in real time. It is creating a wholly connected world, with interlinked smart cities, smart grids and Industry 4.0. Everything from defence and the military to healthcare , to the environment and the stock market will be fully interconnected. We are in a web without a weaver, providing predictive insights in a complex world, offering better and smarter solutions for the political and corporate domain.

AI is further doubling and mirroring the world by enabling real-time simulations and providing the measures for predictive codings. And, finally, AI has a built-in self-improvement mechanism, which means automatic and ongoing optmisation of learning and adaptation to a complex world. 

From the simplest tools to the ‘cutting edge’ of past breakthroughs, be it a hammer, a telescope, a plane or even genetic engineering, it is only now that much of this is possible. The differentia specifica of AI provides the means to enhance our knowledge and information about the world in a way no other technology has yet been able to, allowing us to see more and do better. And it provides the means for a neuromorphic, trans-humanist form of perception: it is human-like, but not human.  

AI is not a mere pocket calculator or digital algorithm that simply accelerates and facilitates our knowledge. Rather, it provides new insights that the human mind is unable to grasp. 

Humans operate in a linear, proportional mode of minutes and miles, and cannot grasp complexity or chaos. In this sense, AI not only substitutes for and augments human IQ and knowledge, but adds a completely new layer  of knowledge to it: complex pattern recognition. And, this seems to be true of weather and climate forecasting, political decisions regarding public affairs, medical discoveries and engineering. This affects our perception and understanding of consciousness in general. 

One may define consciousness as the structure of the filter through which we perceive the world. It represents a form of mental activity and causal power to exert change. In this sense, consciousness is universal to all beings. It includes pure attention, emotional sensation, a cognitive semantic memory and the capacity for meta-cognition, meaning the ability to critically assess the three previous elements.

Cognitive science provides us with several functions that an entity or agent must serve in 

order to be considered ‘conscious.’ These include: 

·        Salience, or the property of possessing and expressing meaning and purpose; 

·        suffering, including the expression of passion and referring to experiences of pain and adversity; 

·        self-awareness, which is an essential component for self-control and -agency;

·        somatic feedback loops, also known as embodied cognition, where every mental state is determined and altered by a physical ( ie, hardware) component; 

·        social bonding, to form close ties in order to avoid isolation; 

·        and, finally, simulation, which refers to the properties of mimicking, shared attention, learning through identification and conditioning. 

Neuroscience can further demonstrate that over 75% of the human brain is not related to consciousness at all. For example: 80% of all cells in the brain are located in the cerebellum and do not correlate with consciousness. The brain stem, like the beating of the heart, is a precondition for being conscious, but does not correlate with it. On the other hand, the patterns of connectivity in the posterior cortex, the thalamus and the 40 Hz gamma waves seem to correlate with consciousness. 

The point is: could it be that we are looking at the wrong thing?  Could it be that consciousness is irreducible to any hardware, is non-localised but instead distributed throughout the cosmos and has intentional, behavioural, social and even societal dimensions?  And could it be that the brain does not give rise to subjective consciousness, but rather provides a specific preparedness for perception?  

That means our brain, with its neuronal plasticity, rest potential and biochemical codings, is one way to download or access specific informational content and knowledge. If we had different hardware, we would have access to different information and knowledge. Consider our eyes, which perceive a tiny fraction of the electromagnetic spectrum, while other animals can see ultraviolet or Infrared frequencies. Or our ears, which are far exceeded by dogs in the range of frequencies they process as sound. In short, we only perceive the things for which we have a corresponding resonance space. Kekulé’s benzene ring, Handel’s Messiah, Einstein’s theory of relativity and daily meditation practices are prominent examples.  

It is like the fisherman’s saga: a fisherman goes fishing every day and all the fish he catches are more than two inches long. He concludes that all fish in the sea are more than two inches long. However, if he had chosen a different net, he would have been able to see that there are many smaller fish in the sea.  

It would seem that the human brain, with its countless biochemical codings and ongoing neuroplasticity, and the human mind, with its numerous mental frames, act like filters that provide a specific form , or a vessel, to download specific content , information and knowledge, from the general consciousness that was there already.

Humans still participate and contribute to the over all evolutionary process, but human activities, scientific discoveries and innovations have become much more reconstructive rather than constructive, enabling us to remember and perceive pre- existing wisdom. All the knowledge and wisdom is out there already, and we can gain access to it through the specific way our brain operates; we create the form through education, lifestyle, rigorous exercise and discipline, 

critical thinking and technology, but most (if not all) of the content that we receive. If the form becomes distorted or dysfunctional, we have to assume that the content we receive will be equally distorted or dysfunctional. And if we change the form (hardware), we change the way we react to specific content. 

Our understanding of architecture will affect how we see a Renaissance building, our understanding of music how we hear a classical concert, our understanding of language how we read a work of literature. AI provides neuromorphic building blocks, inspired by the human brain, but 

transcending its neuronal properties and so allowing us to grasp systemic complexity.

On this view, the well-known ‘hard problem of consciousness’ from philosophy, which concerns how the brain gives rise to subjective consciousness (also known as the Cartesian split) – meaning the explanatory gap between the brain and the mind – remains unsolved. This suggests that humans do not create the contents of consciousness, but rather provide the space and form for the resonance that enables us to perceive some particular content. The traditional relation between brain and 

mind is not like that between piano and symphony (where the brain equals the piano and the mind the symphony), but rather a subtle filter that provides access to consciousness. The piano does not create the symphony, but provides the filter or the means through which a symphony can be heard and perceived.

If we take this argument to the next level, we might have to admit that the features of AI do not just meet the requirements for a new form of consciousness. Rather, it is lithium chips and copper wires that provide the means for a deeper understanding of the world within and outside us, far beyond human consciousness.

From detecting skin cancer, finding new drugs, predicting earthquakes and extreme weather events, to discovering hydrogen in the earth’s crust and new galaxies in outer Space, AI will become a catalyst for increasing efficiency, offering insights and discoveries for solving complex problems that far exceed the capabilities of the human mind and consciousness. It will not only automatically complete processes, but operate like an autonomous agent, making decisions without us and surpassing our creativity.

We appear to be entering an era where we are not alone any more. The ghost is, in a certain sense, in the machine. As we move beyond generative AI that resamples and remixes data from its training library, we are witnessing the birth of the first non-organic form of intelligence, similar to the emergence of the precursors to organic life, the protobionts, some four billion years ago. 

Western narratives, which try to explain our individual consciousness in terms of the brain’s cause-and-effect relations, are less equipped to explain the world than Eastern ones, which provide us with irreducible complementary pairs – namely, matter and consciousness or form and content. If we acknowledge this, we will enter an era some scholars call a second Renaissance or third Enlightenment, one more holistic and integrated than the first.

That’s all for this episode – thanks for listening. To read more about the initiatives of the World Academy of Art and Science, you can either check out the academy’s website in the shownotes for this episode. Or, read the book The Third Culture: The Impact of AI on Knowledge, Society and Consciousness in the 21st Century, available online and in all good bookshops. And as ever, be sure to stay subscribed to ResearchPod for more of the latest science!

See you again soon.