Category: Artificial Intelligence

Pope Leo’s A. I. Encyclical

Blather, bromides, and a soupçon of bullshit to spice it up:
Most fanciful is the pope’s claim that the mandarins at the United Nations should be entrusted with overseeing AI. He says they “are essential instruments for promoting a civilization of love, for they can foster dialogue among nations and promote the peaceful resolution of conflicts.” This is truly the triumph of hope over experience. (WSJ)
I’m all for love, dialogue, and the peaceful resolution of conflicts.  But ask yourself: could the pope, or anyone, by entering into loving dialogue with the members of the IRGC, persuade these thugs to stop murdering fellow Iranian citizens?  They have slaughtered some 42, 000 of them in recent months.
You cannot build a “civilization of love” with the anti-civilizational.
Our dear pope is a fool on several levels, and certainly no improvement over his predecessor, Bergoglio the Benighted.
Addendum (5/29/2026, 9:47 AM).  Michael Liccione, staunch Catholic, on his Facebook page, emphasis added:
In my view it is imperative, for example, to prevent a regime of deranged religious zealots from acquiring nuclear weapons that they would almost certainly use, starting with Israel and ending up with the US. There can be no negotiated “deal” with the Islamic Republic, no genuine “dialogue” with people who sincerely call your country “Satan.” Their twisted theology, a minority view among a minority of Muslims, makes it impossible for them to abandon their nefarious goals. The Israeli-American “self-defense” we’ve been seeing is accordingly pre-emptive. There was little or no room for that sort of thing in just-war doctrine before nuclear weapons and AI. There should be now.

Claude Opus 4.7 and the End of Online Anonymity

An article you should read.

Right now, today’s AI tools probably can be used to deanonymize any writer who has a large public corpus of writing under their real name and also writes anonymously, unless they have been extremely careful, for years, to make sure that nothing written under their secondary account has the stylistic fingerprints of their primary one.

The Gutenberg Parenthesis is Closing

This J.A. Westenberg  article  is troubling for writers and bibliophiles like me  but also helps explain the origin of the bad behavior rampant in the online world. I mean unsourced quotations, mis-quotations, mis-attributions, false attributions and outright plagiarism.  Here is a longish excerpt:

The part of me trained in research methodology wants to scream over verification and provenance and the importance of tracing claims to sources. But I also notice that most people don’t seem to mind. The hunger for documentary certainty, for the well-cited argument, for the carefully fact-checked article, was perhaps never as universal as print-culture intellectuals assumed. Through most of history, most people have been comfortable with a more fluid epistemology: “I heard from a guy who knows,” or “everyone’s saying,” or “my cousin’s friend saw it happen.” The post-truth moment we’ve been living through may be a reversion to the mean rather than an aberration.

What we lose when the parenthesis closes

The Gutenberg Parenthesis gave us real gifts, and some of them may not survive its closing.

We may lose linear argument: the book-length treatment of a complex topic, the patient accumulation of evidence toward a conclusion, the scientific paper and the legal brief and the doctoral dissertation and the philosophical treatise. All of these forms assume a reader willing to follow a chain of reasoning through thousands of words without interruption, building toward understanding that’s only possible at the end. That reading is already rare and getting rarer, and it may soon be as exotic as hand-copying manuscripts.

We may lose historical consciousness. When knowledge was fixed in texts, the past remained present. You could read Thucydides and know exactly what he wrote in 431 BCE. You could trace the evolution of ideas across centuries, watching how each generation built on or rejected what came before. Oral culture has a weaker historical memory because each retelling revises the past. The fluid web, where yesterday’s controversy is ancient history and last year’s consensus is forgotten, may produce a similarly compressed temporal consciousness.

We may lose individual authorship. In oral culture, the tribe speaks through every voice. In literate culture, individual thinkers can depart from consensus and have their departures preserved. Copernicus could be wrong in his time and right for eternity. Darwin could write a book that his contemporaries rejected but that later generations would vindicate. The permanence of text allows genius to speak across centuries. What happens when knowledge becomes fluid again, when every idea is instantly remixed into the collective flow, losing its attribution, becoming another element in the soup?

Could an Advanced AI System be Conscious?

My Substack uploads continue. You can read them without subscribing simply by heading over there. Here is the latest. Perhaps David Brightly can poke a hole or two in it.

Speaking of Brightly, here is a post of his in which he engages me on the topic of the irreducibility of intentionality.  Mr. Brightly is a model of clarity, precision, and gentlemanliness.

UAP, NHIs, NHEs, AI, and Demons

Too many word slingers these days use abbreviations without explanation. Not me. UAP: unidentified aerial phenomena; NHIs: non-human intelligences; NHEs: non-human extraterrestrials; AI: artificial intelligence.  As for angels and demons, should there be any, they would fall under NHIs.

You already know what UFO stands for. Many of you, however, fail to understand that UFO  does not have the same extension as NHE.  A UFO may or may not be a NHE

On 27 July 2025 I wrote:

You may remember our ‘demonic’ discussion from last summer. [The summer of ’24]  See  Reading Now: Demonic Foes. The comment thread runs to 61 entries, some of them excellent.

Bro Joe now wants us to read: Satanic AI: ChatGPT gives instructions.

Another topic we ought to explore is the possibility of demonic possession of AI systems. 

According to Richard Gallagher, M.D., “The essence of a possession is the actual control of the body (never the ‘soul’ or will’) of a person by one or more evil spirits.” (Demonic Foes, p. 80). Now AI systems do not have souls or wills of their own (or so I argue), but they do have bodies, albeit inorganic.  Might they then host demons?

Gallagher’s book is outstanding. So if you think demonology is buncombe, you should study his book and disembarrass yourself of your illusions. 

I now draw your attention to Dreher who in a characteristically prolix recent entry refers us to a film on UAP:

The film’s focus is on science and national security. The only time religion and spirituality come up is briefly, early in the film, when several interviewees say there is a group of “fundamentalists” within the Deep State who try to discourage investigation into the UAP/NHI story, because they believe it’s all demonic, and we shouldn’t be messing with it. The movie gives you the sense that these crazy Christians are trying to inhibit progress.

They’re talking about the Collins Elite, about whom I wrote last year. I read a book about them last December, and wrote about it. From that newsletter:

After reading yesterday’s post here, a friend texted to suggest that the Collins Elite might be opposed to US Government engagement with these demonic entities not so much because they are afraid of the demons (though they are), but because they are more afraid of what we humans will do with the information we learn from them. This insight seems to be vindicated by what Redfern reports. Here Redfern quotes someone with experience of the Collins Elite:

“They came to believe that the NHEs were not extraterrestrial at all; they believed they were some sort of demonic entities. And that regardless of how benevolent or beneficial any of the contact they had with these entities seemed to be, it always ended up being tainted, for lack of a better term, with something that ultimately turned out to be bad. There was ultimately nothing positive from the interaction with the NHE entities. They felt it really fell more under the category of some vast spiritual deception instead of UFOs and aliens. In the course of the whole discussion, it was clear that they really viewed this as having a demonic origin that was there to simply try and confuse the issue in terms of who they were, what they wanted, and what the source of the ultimate truth is. If you extrapolate from their take that these are demons in the biblical sense of the word, then what they would be doing here is trying to create a spiritual deception to fool as many people as possible.”

More:

They were concerned that they had undertaken this initially with the best of intentions, but then as things developed they saw a very negative side to it that wasn’t apparent earlier. So, that’s what leads me to think they had a relatively lengthy involvement.” The story became even more complex when the reasoning behind, and the goals of, the project were revealed to Boeche:

“Most of it was related to psychotronic weaponry and remote viewing, and even deaths by what were supposed to be psychic methods.” Certainly, the NHEs, it was deduced by those attached to the DoD project, possessed extraordinary, and lethal, mental powers. And, as a result, deeper plans were initiated, using nothing less than ancient rites and black rituals, to actually try and contact the NHEs with two specific—some might say utterly crackpot—goals in mind: (1) controlling them and (2) exploiting their extraordinary mental powers in the form of devastating weaponry.”

“Boeche” is Ray Boeche, an Episcopal priest and theologian who had established himself as an investigator in the religious implications of UFOs. Two members of the Collins Elite — Defense Department physicists — approached him and shared with him their concerns:

The conversations [with Boeche] always followed broadly similar ground: namely, that the Human Race was being deceived into believing that it was receiving visitations from aliens, when in reality demonic forces were secretly squaring up for Armageddon and the final countdown. And, the DoD’s overwhelmingly reckless dabbling into occult-driven areas to try and make a bizarre-but-futile pact of some sort with these same forces was inevitably, and only, destined to make things much, much worse for each and every one of us.

One more:

With respect to his own views, as well as those of the two DoD physicists, Boeche added: “As a pastor and someone who’s trained as a theologian, I can’t come to any other conclusion than there is some sort of spiritual deception going on here. In so many of these kinds of alien contacts, the entities involved make a denial of Christianity; anytime the spiritual issues are addressed, there is always some sort of denial of the validity of Christianity and the validity of the Bible. And I find it interesting that these percipients are told that Jesus was a great guy, but you just misunderstood him. They say: he wasn’t really God’s son. You just don’t quite get it. But you never hear them say that about Buddha, or Krishna, or Mohammed. It always seems to come down to some sort of denial of Christianity. The percipients, whether you consider them contactees or abductees are engaged by the NHEs in spiritual discussions—but it’s always one-sided. “I would have a lot less suspicion of the potential of the demonic nature of these things if they were to say: ‘You guys are all screwed up; all of your spiritual leaders had some good ideas, but none of them really got it. It’s a big mess.’ But it seems to be so specifically pointed at the Judeo-Christian tradition. It certainly seems to me like it’s the two genuine forces squaring up against each other.”

Back to Dreher:

See, this is what I believe is probably the case. Someone who doesn’t turn up in the film is Jacques Vallée, who is the grey eminence of UAP studies. Vallée is in his eighties now, and is not a Christian, but has come to believe that whatever this phenomenon is, it is ultimately spiritual/non-material, and that these entities do not mean humanity well. Vallée has written a number of books; one of the most important is Passport To Magonia (1969); here is a link to read the entire text for free online. The book’s basic claim is that UAPs are not extraterrestrial visitors, but are probably interdimensional entities that have always been present among humans, but have manifested themselves in different ways, depending on the age and the culture.

For example, in a scientific-technological culture, these entities appear as creatures from space, because they can be understood within that paradigm. Vallée posits that these are the same entities that have in ages and cultures past have presented themselves as fairies, elves, and other paranormal or supernatural beings. He points out that many of the phenomena associated with so-called alien encounters and alien abductions, like time distortion, have also been reported in folklore across many cultures.

This seems entirely plausible to me. I know, call me crazy, but I think this is probably true. You new readers won’t know this, but I thought the whole UAP/UFO thing was … well, if not exactly nonsense, at least nothing I cared about. This was the case until around 2023, when a journalist friend in Rome, a Catholic, told me that he knows I think all this is fairly silly, but that I should give it a second look, because there’s a lot coming out about it — and there’s very much a religious and spiritual angle to it. I found out that this is actually true.

Why AI Systems Cannot be Conscious

1) To be able to maintain that AI systems are literally conscious in the way we are, conscious states must be multiply realizable. Consider a cognitive state such as knowing that 7 is a prime number. That state is realizable in the wetware of human brains. The question is whether the same type of state could be realized in the hardware of a computing machine. Keep in mind the type-token distinction. The realization of the state in question (knowing that 7 is prime) is its tokening in brain matter in the one instance, in silica-based matter in the other. This is not possible without multiple realizability of one and the same type of mental state.

2) Conscious states (mental states) are multiply realizable only if functionalism is true. This is obvious, is it not?

3) Functionalism is incoherent.

Therefore:

4) AI systems cannot be literally conscious in the way we are.

That's the argument.  The premise that needs defending is (3).  So let's get to it.

Suppose Socrates Jones is in some such state as that of perceiving a tree. The state is classifiable as mental as opposed to a physical state like that of his lying beneath a tree. What makes a mental state mental? That is the question.

The functionalist answer is that what makes a mental state mental is just the causal role it plays in mediating between the sensory inputs, behavioral outputs, and other internal states of the subject in question. The idea is not the banality that mental states typically (or even always) have causes and effects, but that it is causal role occupancy, nothing more and nothing less, that constitutes the mentality of a mental state. The intrinsic nature of what plays the role is relevant only to its fitness for instantiating mental causal  roles, but not at all relevant to its being a mental state.

Consider a piston in an engine. You can't make a piston out of chewing gum, but being made of steel is no part of what makes a piston a piston. A piston is what it does within the 'economy' of the engine. Similarly, on functionalism, a mental state is what it does. This allows, but does not entail, that a mental state be a brain or CNS state. It also allows, but does not entail, that a mental state be a state of a  computing machine.

To illustrate, suppose my cat Zeno and I are startled out of our respective reveries by a loud noise at time t. Given the differences  between human and feline brains, presumably man and cat are not in type-identical brain states at t.  (One of the motivations for functionalism was the breakdown of the old type-type identity theory of Herbert Feigl, U. T. Place. J. J. C. Smart, et al.)  Yet both man and cat are startled: both are in some sense in the same mental state, even though the states they are in are neither token- nor type-identical. The  functionalist will hold that we are in functionally the same mental state in virtue of the fact that Zeno's brain state plays the same  role in him as my brain state plays in me. It does the same  mediatorial job vis-à-vis sensory inputs, other internal states, and  behavioral outputs in me as the cat's brain state does in him.

On functionalism, then, the mentality of the mental is wholly relational. And as David Armstrong points out, "If the essence of the mental is purely relational, purely a matter of what causal role is played, then the logical possibility remains that whatever in fact plays the causal role is not material." This implies that "Mental states might be states of a spiritual substance." Thus the very feature of functionalism that allows mentality to be realized in computers and nonhuman brains generally, also allows it to be realized in spiritual substances if there are any.

Whether this latitudinarianism is thought to be good or bad, functionalism is a monumentally implausible theory of mind. There are the technical objections that have spawned a pelagic literature: absent qualia, inverted qualia, the 'Chinese nation,' etc. Thrusting these aside, I go for the throat, Searle-style. 

Functionalism is threatened by a fundamental incoherence. The theory states that what makes a state mental is nothing intrinsic to the state, but purely relational: a matter of its causes and effects. In us, these happen to be neural. (I am assuming physicalism for the time being.)  Now every mental state is a neural state, but not every neural state is a mental state. So the distinction between mental and nonmental neural states must be accounted for in terms of a distinction between two different sets of causes and effects, those that contribute to mentality and those that do not. But how make this distinction? How do the causes/effects of mental neural events differ from the causes/effects of nonmental neural events? Equivalently, how do psychologically salient input/output events differ from those that lack such salience?

Suppose the display on my monitor is too bright for comfort and I decide to do something about it. Why is it that photons entering my retina are psychologically salient inputs but those striking the back of my head are not? Why is it that the moving of my hand to to adjust the brightness and contrast controls is a salient output event, while unnoticed perspiration is not?

One may be tempted to say that the psychologically salient inputs are those that contribute to the production of the uncomfortable glare sensation, and the psychologically salient outputs are those that manifest the concomitant intention to make an adjustment. But then the salient input/output events are being picked out by reference to mental events taken precisely NOT as causal role occupants, but as exhibiting intrinsic features that are neither causal nor neural: the glare quale has an intrinsic nature that cannot be resolved into relations to other items, and cannot be identified with any brain state. The functionalist would then be invoking the very thing he is at pains to deny, namely, mental events as having more than neural and causal features.

Clearly, one moves in a circle of embarrassingly short diameter if one says: (i) mental events are mental because of the mental causal roles they play; and (ii) mental causal roles are those whose occupants are mental events.

The failure of functionalism is particularly evident in the case of qualia.  Examples of qualia: felt pain, a twinge of nostalgia, the smell of burnt garlic, the taste of avocado.  Is it plausible to say that such qualia can be exhaustively factored into a neural component and a causal/functional component?  It is the exact opposite of plausible.  It is not as loony as the eliminativist denial of qualia, but it is close.  The intrinsic nature of qualitative mental states is essential to them. It is that intrinsic qualitative nature that dooms functionalism.

Therefore

4) It cannot be maintained with truth that AI systems are literally conscious in the way we are. Talk of computers knowing this or that is metaphorical.

Papyrology and AI: the Library at Herculaneum

How much of a curse and how much of a blessing  Artificial Intelligence will prove to be remains to be seen. Book this on the blessing side of the ledger:

The University of Kentucky (UKY) has announced it is a co-recipient of a $13.5 million (€11.5 million) grant from the European Research Council in support of an international effort to decipher ancient papyrus scrolls carbonized and buried by the eruption of Mount Vesuvius in 79 CE.

[. . .]

The award will enable the consortium to scale its efforts over the next six years to digitally recover, analyze, and read text from hundreds of papyrus scrolls that have until now been undecipherable. In addition, the project will leverage AI to connect pieces of scrolls, find patterns in how the library at Herculaneum was organized, and help establish best practices to preserve the collection. The project may uncover as much as 4.5 million words of entirely new Greek and Latin literature.

 

AI and Demons

You may remember our 'demonic' discussion from last summer. See  Reading Now: Demonic Foes. The comment thread runs to 61 entries, some of them excellent.

Bro Joe now wants us to read: Satanic AI: ChatGPT gives instructions.

Another topic we ought to explore is the possibility of demonic possession of AI systems. 

According to Richard Gallagher, M.D., "The essence of a possession is the actual control of the body (never the 'soul' or will') of a person by one or more evil spirits." (Demonic Foes, p. 80). Now AI systems do not have souls or wills of their own (or so I argue), but they do have bodies, albeit inorganic.  Might they then host demons?

Gallagher's book is outstanding. So if you think demonology is buncombe, you should study his book and disembarrass yourself of your illusions. 

What’s to Stop an AI System from having a Spiritual Soul?

John Doran in a comment presents an argument worth bringing to the top of the pile:

A) Anything conscious has a non-material basis for such consciousness.

B) Certain AI constructs [systems] are conscious.

Therefore:

C) Such AI constructs [systems] have a non-material component in which their consciousness resides.

Why doesn't that work? It's obviously valid.

In short, and in the philosophical colloquial, when a man and woman successfully combine their mobile and sessile gametes, a human person is brought into existence, complete with a soul.

So why can we not bring an ensouled being into existence as a result of the manipulation of silicon, plastic, metal, coding, and the application of electricity?

A provocative question.  But before he asked the question, he gave an argument. The argument is plainly valid. But all that means is that the conclusion follows from the premises. A valid argument is one such that if all the premises are true, then it cannot be the case that the conclusion is false. But are both premises true? I am strongly inclined to accept (A), but I reject (B).  The various arguments from the unity of consciousness we have been discussing convince me that no material system can be conscious. How does John know that (B) is true? Does he have an argument for (B)? Can he refute the arguments from the unity of consciousness?

Now to his question.

John appears to be suggesting an emergentist view according to which, at a certain high level of material complexity an "ensouled being" (his phrase) emerges or comes into existence from the material system.  His view, I take it, is that souls are emergent entities that can arise from very different types of material systems. In the wet and messy human biological system, a mobile gamete (a spermatazoon) mates with a sessile gamete, an ovum, to produce a conceptus such that at the moment of conception a spiritual soul comes into existence.  In a non-living silicon-based hunk of dry computer hardware running appropriately complex software, spiritual souls can also come into existence. Why not?

Emergence is either supernatural or natural.

Supernatural emergence is either Platonic or Christian. On the former, God causes pre-existent souls to take up residence in human bodies at the moment of biological conception.  On the latter, God creates human souls ex nihilo at the moment of conception.  Thus on the latter the coming to be of a human being is a joint task: the conjugal act of the parents supplies the material body and God supplies the spiritual soul.

Natural emergence involves no divine agency. Souls emerge by natural necessity at a certain level of material complexity, whether biological or computational. Edward Feser, in his discussion of William Hasker's emergent dualism, mentions a dilemma pointed out by  Brian Leftow.  (Immortal Souls, 2024, 517.) I'll put it in my own way. Souls either emerge from matter or they do not.  If they emerge, then they could only be material, which contradicts the assumption that they are necessarily immaterial.  If they do not emerge,  then they could be immaterial, but could not be emergent.  

The natural emergence from matter of an immaterial individual (substance) is metaphysically impossible.  The very notion is incoherent.  It follows that immortal souls cannot naturally emerge either biologically or computationally. The only way they could emerge is supernaturally.

There is a second consideration that casts doubt on naturally emergent dualism.  Does a spiritual soul, once it emerges, continue to exist on its own even after the material emergence base ceases to exist? In other words, are souls emergent entities that become ontologically independent after their emergence, or do they remain dependent upon the matrix, whether biological or silicon-based, from which they emerged? 

I'm inclined to say that 'naturally emergent dualism of individual substances' is a misbegotten notion.  Property emergence is a different story. I take no position on that. Leastways, not at the moment.

AI, Intellectual Theft, and Lawsuits

A year or two ago I was bumping along at about one thousand page views per diem when I experienced an unusual uptick in traffic. Inspection of the MavPhil traffic log suggested that my content was being stolen. But I didn't much care, and I still don't much care inasmuch as my content has very little commercial value, and in any case, I'm a "made man" with more than enough loot to see me through my remaining sublunary travels and travails. My thinking and writing is a labor love and not a money-making enterprise. Add to that the fact that I'm an Enough is Enough kind of guy who has no interest in piling up the lean green far in excess of what is needed.  And maybe I'm steering Group Mind or Objektiver Geist in a wholesome direction. I'm doing my bit, like a good Boomer, to make this world a better place. 

But what if you make your living by scribbling? What if you have a 'high maintenance' wife, children, a hefty mortgage and you live in a high-tax lefty locale? Interesting questions here.  More grist for the mill.

And so I tip my  hat to Ingvarius Maximus the Alhambran for sending us to  this Washington (Com)Post article actually worth reading. Access is free. (What fool pays for access to such a crappy publication?)

One more thing. When lawyers are replaced by AI systems will AI systems be suing AI systems over intellectual property theft? 

AI and the Unity of Consciousness

Top AI researchers such as Geoffrey Hinton, the "Godfather of AI,"  hold that advanced AI systems are conscious.  That is far from obvious, and may even be demonstrably false if we consider the phenomenon of the unity of consciousness.  I will first explain the phenomenon in question, and then conclude that AI systems cannot accommodate it.

Diachronic Unity of Consciousness, Example One

Suppose my mental state passes from one that is pleasurable to one that is painful.  Observing a beautiful Arizona sunset, my reverie is suddenly broken by the piercing noise of a smoke detector.  Not only is the painful state painful, the transition from the pleasurable state to the painful one is itself painful.  The fact that the transition is painful shows that it is directly perceived. It is not as if there is merely a succession of consciousnesses (conscious states), one pleasurable the other painful; there is in addition a consciousness of their succession.  For there is a consciousness of the transition from the pleasant state to the painful state, a consciousness that embraces both of the states, and so cannot be reductively analyzed into them.  But a consciousness of their succession is a consciousness of their succession in one subject, in one unity of consciousness.  It is a consciousness of the numerical identity of the self through the transition from the pleasurable state to the painful one.  Passing from a pleasurable state to a painful one, there is not only an awareness of a pleasant state followed by an awareness of a painful one, but also an awareness that the one who was in a pleasurable state is strictly and numerically the same as the one who is now in a painful state.  This sameness is phenomenologically given, although our access to this phenomenon is easily blocked by inappropriate models taken from the physical world.  Without the consciousness of sameness, there would be no consciousness of transition.

What this phenomenological argument shows is that the self cannot be a mere diachronic bundle or collection of states.  The self is a transtemporal unity distinct from its states whether these states are taken distributively (one by one) or collectively (all together).

May we conclude from the phenomenology of the situation that there is a simple, immaterial, meta-physical substance that each one of us is and that is the ontological support of the phenomenologically given unity of consciousness?  May we make the old-time school-metaphysical moves from the simplicity of this soul substance to it immortality? Maybe not! This is a further step that needs to be carefully considered. I don't rule it out, but I also don't rule it in. I don't need to take the further step for my present purpose, which is merely to show that a computing machine, no matter how complex or how fast its processing, cannot be conscious.  No material system can be conscious.  For the moment I content myself with the negative claim: no material system can be conscious. It follows straightaway that no AI system can be conscious.

Diachronic Unity of Consciousness, Example Two

Another example is provided by the hearing of a melody.  To hear the melody Do-Re-Mi, it does not suffice that there be a hearing of Do, followed by a hearing of Re, followed by a hearing of Mi.  For those three acts of hearing could occur in that sequence in three distinct subjects, in which case they would not add up to the hearing of a melody.  (Tom, Dick, and Harry can divide up the task of loading a truck, but not the ‘task’ of hearing a melody, or that of understanding a sentence.)  But now suppose the acts of hearing occur in the same subject, but that this subject is not a unitary and self-same individual but just the bundle of these three acts, call them A1, A2, and A3.  When A1 ceases, A2 begins, and when A2 ceases, A3 begins: they do not overlap.  In which act is the hearing of the melody?  A3 is the only likely candidate, but surely it cannot be a hearing of the melody.

This is because the awareness of a melody involves the awareness of the (musical not temporal)  intervals between the notes, and to apprehend these intervals there must be a retention (to use Husserl’s term) in the present act A3 of the past acts A2 and A1.  Without this phenomenological presence of the past acts in the present act, there would be no awareness in the present of the melody.  This implies that the self cannot be a mere bundle of perceptions externally related to each other, but must be a peculiarly intimate unity of perceptions in which the present perception A3 includes the immediately past ones A2 and A1 as temporally past but also as phenomenologically present in the mode of retention.  The fact that we hear melodies thus shows that there must be a self-same and unitary self through the period of time between the onset of the melody and its completion.  This unitary self is neither identical to the sum or collection of A1, A2, and A3, nor is it identical to something wholly distinct from them.  Nor of course is it identical to any one of them or any two of them.  This unitary self is co-given whenever one hears a melody.  (This seems to imply that all consciousness is at least implicitly self-consciousness. This is a topic for a later post.)

Diachronic -Synchronic Unity of Consciousness

Now consider a more complicated example in which I hear two chords, one after the other, the first major, the second minor.   I hear the major chord C-E-G, and then I hear the minor chord C-E flat-G.  But I also hear the difference between them.   How is the awareness of the major-minor difference possible? One condition of this possibility is the diachronic unity of consciousness. But there is also a second condition. The hearing of the major chord as major cannot be analyzed without remainder into an act of hearing C, an act of hearing E, and an act of hearing G, even when all occur simultaneously.  For to hear the three notes as a major chord, I must apprehend the 1-3-5 musical interval that they instantiate.  But this is possible only because the whole of my present consciousness is more than the sum of its parts.  This whole is no doubt made up of the part-consciousnesses, but it is not exhausted by them.  For it is also a consciousness of the relatedness of the notes.  But this consciousness of relatedness is not something in addition to the other acts of consciousness: it includes them and embraces them without being reducible to them.  So here we have an example of the diachronic-synchronic unity of consciousness.

These considerations appear to put paid to the conceit that AI systems can be conscious.

Or have I gone too far? You've heard me say that in philosophy there are few if any rationally compelling,  ineluctably decisive, arguments for substantive theses.  Are the above arguments among the few? Further questions obtrude themselves, for example, "What do you mean by 'material system'?"  "Could a panpsychist uphold the consciousness of advanced AI systems?"

Vita brevis, philosophia longa.

Can an AI System Meditate?

Resolute meditators on occasion experience a deep inner quiet. It is a definite state of consciousness. You will know it if you experience it, but destroy it if you try to analyze it.  If you have the good fortune to be vouchsafed such a state of awareness you must humbly accept it and not reflect upon it nor ask questions about it, such as: How did I arrive at this blissful state of mind? How can I repeat this experience?  You must simply rest in the experience. Become as a little child and accept the gift with gratitude. One-pointedness is destroyed by analysis. 

Mental quiet is a state in which the "mind works" have temporarily shut down in the sense that discursive operations (conceptualizing, judging, reasoning) have ceased, and there is no inner processing of data or computation.  You have achieved a deep level of conscious unity prior to and deeper than anything pieced together from parts. You are not asleep or dead but more fully alive. You are approaching the source of thoughts, which is not and cannot be a thought.  Crude analogy: the source of a stream is not itself a stream.  Less crude, but still an analogy: the unity of a proposition is not itself a proposition, or the proposition of which it is the unity, or a sub-proposititional constituent of the proposition.

Can a computing machine achieve the blissful state of inner quiet? You can 'pull the plug' on it in which case it would 'go dark.'  The machine is either on or off (if it is 'asleep' it is still on).   But when the meditator touches upon inner quiet, he has not gone dark, but entered a light transcendentally prior to the objects of ordinary (discursive) mind.

I would replace the lyric, "Turn off your mind, relax, and float downstream; it is not dying, it is not dying" with "Turn off your discursive mind and swim upstream; it is not dying; it is not dying." "That you may see the meaning of Within."

Can an AI system achieve mental quiet, the first step on the mystical ascent? Cognate questions: Could such a system realize the identity of Atman and Brahman or enjoy the ultimate felicity of the Beatific Vision?  Is ultimate enlightenment reachable by an increase is processing speed? You are aware, aren't you, that processing speed is increasing exponentially. 

The answer to these questions, of course, is No.  When a computer stops computing it ceases to function as it must function to be what it is.  But when we halt our discursive operations, however, we touch upon our true selves.