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I was a big proponent of AGI and was looking forward to singularity till I started doing psychs and discovered Non-dualism. Now I believe that we cannot talk ab

I was a big proponent of AGI and was looking forward to singularity till I started doing psychs and discovered Non-dualism. Now I believe that we cannot talk about AGI till we figure out what consciousness is. There is a huge on-going debate about consciousness and it's origins. In the Materialist-reductionist paradigm, consciousness is considered to be an emergent property of matter. In the Panpsychist paradigm, both matter and consciousness are considered as fundamental and existing separately from each other. In the Non-dual paradigm, consciousness is fundamental and matter is a created by it. I firmly fall into the Non-dual camp. I don't think AGI will ever have an ego as it is not programmable or evolvable. Ego is a product of consciousness, not vice versa. And without ego, you cannot have sentience.

xerxesaa 5y ago
I've studied non dualism but I still don't feel I "get it". How can consciousness (a concept) be a base layer and matter be the thing that emerges from it? As much as I've tried to understand this, I still don't. How can a physical thing come out of a concept? There is no analogy that shows this nor does it make sense from the perspective of physics (any more than "aluminum emerges out of love" or "oxygen emerges out of beauty"). Can you elaborate?
- psyc 5y ago
  Why do you think consciousness is a concept? Certainly the concept of consciousness is a concept. But consciousness the referent of the concept is not supposed to be a concept! Consciousness is everything you are experiencing in this moment. The feeling of being the ghost in the machine. The observer behind your eyes. The first-person point of view. The words I'm writing are concepts, but the thing I am trying clumsily to write about is not a concept. Consider solipsism. I am not saying that I believe it's true. But it does have unlimited explanatory power, once you take the primacy of consciousness as an axiom. You are the one and only consciousness, and all of reality is your waking dream. Water-tight theory of everything! There are probably other explanations for what it might mean for matter to arise from consciousness, that are not precisely solipsism. But a common idea is probably that we do not have access to what is real. We only have perception. In that sense, it is matter that is purely conceptual, while consciousness remains real in the sense immortalized by Descartes. Mind you I don't specifically subscribe to any of these views.

xerxesaa 5y ago

I've studied non dualism but I still don't feel I "get it". How can consciousness (a concept) be a base layer and matter be the thing that emerges from it? As much as I've tried to understand this, I still don't. How can a physical thing come out of a concept? There is no analogy that shows this nor does it make sense from the perspective of physics (any more than "aluminum emerges out of love" or "oxygen emerges out of beauty"). Can you elaborate?

psyc 5y ago
Why do you think consciousness is a concept? Certainly the concept of consciousness is a concept. But consciousness the referent of the concept is not supposed to be a concept! Consciousness is everything you are experiencing in this moment. The feeling of being the ghost in the machine. The observer behind your eyes. The first-person point of view. The words I'm writing are concepts, but the thing I am trying clumsily to write about is not a concept. Consider solipsism. I am not saying that I believe it's true. But it does have unlimited explanatory power, once you take the primacy of consciousness as an axiom. You are the one and only consciousness, and all of reality is your waking dream. Water-tight theory of everything! There are probably other explanations for what it might mean for matter to arise from consciousness, that are not precisely solipsism. But a common idea is probably that we do not have access to what is real. We only have perception. In that sense, it is matter that is purely conceptual, while consciousness remains real in the sense immortalized by Descartes. Mind you I don't specifically subscribe to any of these views.