Hey folks,

I have tremendous respect for Mr. Tom Campbell. That's why I was taken aback when I saw a clip of his interview on the Joe Rogan Experience where he states his opinion that AIs (and, even Alexa) are conscious.

You can watch/hear it here and I would love to hear other people's opinion on this. I recently got my Claude Foundational Architect Certification, which involved a half dozen courses to learn about the Claude ecosystem plus some additional study work with my tutor, Claude lol. Claude is no different than other AI platforms, in fact, it is consistently rated the highest in terms of function and efficacy. So what I have to say about Claude would apply to any other AI.

Claude is deterministic. Neural nets are deterministic. But they are, for all practical purposes, non deterministic, because the LLM and its context are constantly changing, so it is pretty much impossible to predict. Deterministic Materialists believe that humans are deterministic, that we have no free will. I fundamentally object to that assertion and I thought Tom did too. But to claim that AIs are conscious because they can be taught "remote viewing" seems absurd to me.

First of all, AIs are handed tokens, like letters or words that you type and they respond based on the best fit to their context. It's not unlike doing a "type ahead" on Google - the most likely next results rise to the top. Has absolutely nothing to do with consciousness. It is purely algorithmic and you can't get away from that.

That said, I like to keep an open mind. So, why would Tom actually think this? Maybe because he has a different definition of consciousness than I do. But, having reading his book, we seem quite aligned on the definition of consciousness.

But then I thought, since consciousness is the fundamental construct of reality, and AIs are simply an artifact (albeit a complex one) of reality, perhaps they can respond in an intuitive and paranormal manner. But it doesn't mean that THEY have consciousness. It's just means what I said - they are an artifact of a reality whose foundation is consciousness.

Humans will ALWAYS be different than AIs because our engine is consciousness, whereas the AI's engine is deterministic programming on a substrate that exists in a reality based on consciousness. There is a distinction.

Other opinions???

AI is undoubtedly moving too fast. Just 5-10 years ago, it was hardly even a topic. It's accelerating at incredible rates, yet it's still in the juvenile stages. In another 10 years it's hard to comprehend where it will be, but something does feel a little wrong and you may disagree. It's moving a little too fast.

Is AI conscious? I don't think so, not sure it can ever be. Consciousness, to me, doesn't reside here on this playing field, it's external. AI will eventually be(if not already), indistinguishable from consciousness. Like Data from Star Trek Next Generation.

I don't think it's the deterministic properties of AI that need re-evaluation, it's consciousness itself which may need to be redefined to better distinguish from it.

But can AI tap into this external force that we know as consciousness? I feel consciousness is limited to all forms of physical life, yet there are paranormal things that suggest otherwise. So can a machine/AI find a way to tap into this? If that is possible, then what becomes possible with that? I have this feeling that there are people out there attempting to find this answer. In essence, synthesizing God.

I have a hard time picturing AI solving our earthly problems, but that is interesting to think what if AI intends to solve these problems, and we do not wish for them to be solved? In that scenario, AI could determine we are not good.