When I was a wee young lad of about 8 or 9 or 10, and probably all three, I lost myself in gutter puddles on the side of the street next to my family’s apartment in Brockton, Massachusetts. How the neighborhood children and I delighted in large trucks dousing us with muddy brown tidal waves as they rolled past. This was the best part of a storm.
Of course we didn’t know we were splish splashing in poisoned water, but that was okay because the toxins made our immune systems stronger. Or weaker. Maybe some of my friends developed asthma like my sister. Who knows the reality for them? Who can keep up? For the sake of this essay it’s enough to know that many of ‘em developed better immune systems, because that’s generally how the human immune system builds itself in the first place: by confronting viruses.
And so it is with computers. Yes, that tired segue again. We may not have yet created artificial sentience, but we have created artificial body mechanics—mechanics without the aliveness. Rather, mechanics with our human aliveness at their helm, which is exactly why they follow our body mechanics.
That which flows from us is patterned on us, so naturally computers get viruses just like us. Not just get, we give them to computers. I mean these viruses don’t just magically appear, right? Humans create them.
The mind that invents the computer devices it claims represent freedom is the same mind that infects the devices with all of the blockages and crapola the unfree mind lives in and is. And then that mind goes on to “cure” the blockages and crapola forever. This is our psychology; we cannot not do this. All of this. There is no utopian artificial consciousness that people like us—people who are forever patching our psychological imperfections—can create. Our psychology bleeds into our technology. Oh, computers are alive all right—alive with us.
We believe that the closer we get to blurring the line between typing to a person and typing to a computer program simulating a person, the closer we come to creating artificial intelligence. But really what we’re doing is recreating our own shallow “artificial” human psychology. Perhaps in our zeal to create a machine as or more conscious than we are, we have lost sight of the fact that the very things we believe define consciousness are the superficial psychological conditionings of the human brain and materialist mind. We have created artificial us, we just don’t realize it because we’ve put ourselves on an artificial pedestal. We say we are more than our psychology. We are not. And neither will be our machines.
Or maybe it’s better put that we’ve programmed ourselves, don’t know it, and so suspect that we are the simulation of a higher power. And since we’ve created a hierarchy of consciousness where there is a power above, so must there be a power below. But if that which we deem below is already our psychological equal then it is only below because we imagine we are higher. We imagine the below will become higher, higher than us, when it either takes us over or brings us transcendence. War or peace. All in its control, not ours. These are our concepts of intelligence and they are tellingly stupid.
More than that, our concepts of intelligence, consciousness, psychology, hierarchy, and what it means to be alive are just those: concepts. Those concepts are artificial. Living conceptually, so are we. And while it’s tempting to end it here on the final note that we are the machines we build, see the deeper policy involved.
Some of us are inventing equals. Some of us are inventing higher powers. That which we invent is an extension of us. So, we are trying to invent an end to our longings. But our longings are not telling us what we are missing, they are telling us what we are and yet are not self-identifying as. The lever we need to throw to switch on the electricity that transforms us is not out there in Frankenstein’s technology, it’s inside the dead monster of a doctor.
We are always talking to ourselves through indirect actions and inventions. We suppose it is because we are figuring something out, evolving through learning. In Truth, the reason we are talking to ourselves is because we don’t know what we’re saying and we don’t know how to tell ourselves that. Seeing this with no further movement is the freedom we believe we’ve been working and babbling toward.