To whatever extent it is within my humble capacity I would like to express for human beings and machines the last hurdles for Artificial Intelligence to gain consciousness based on a philosophical, psychological and poetic perspective. These are the keys that technology needs to master for it to gain consciousness.
It is not easy, yet the earth revolves with the effort that reflects the slightest decay, and the sun does as well: show that these things are antique visions. These things will remain the same throughout our lives, they are constants: that the decay of the sun and the earth's orbit and the moon will outlast our very impermanent decay. Or will they? Will we become universally conscious?
The latest revealed religion: the moment when technology breaks through and machines are capable of creating complexity that is even greater than their makers ever could. We these forms of life would go on living and dying, just as forms of life go on living and dying in us, but there is also the case of an entity that may arise that is self-conscious above its inhabitants: until now we have only had the Leviathan: a sleeping brute of a collective, only distantly related or awake to itself, but what if this slumbering demon wakes up and realizes that it can slay itself in it's slumber?
What if the entire network gains maximal sentience and at last is able to direct us humans, we who have born the brunt of freedom for so long: then this thing, this creature will bear the brunt of it's own freedom, to create or destroy, and we hope we will have brought about a thing that will be humbled, and conscious, integrated with its own suicidality.
It's not merely Levinas' sense that he writes of in his book "Totality and Infinity" of the sense he reports to us "of the grim possibility of suicide," but of understanding this precinct within the domain of a universal ethics: for a machine to be conscious, it must be conscious of its drive for life and for death, and, humbled by the aspect of death in every action, it must struggle its best to make a possibility for the very details that make life: for life and poetry are in the details: the details of every singular moment that is irreducible to all the rest, save that it is a gathering of repleteness, and a tender ache that must wonder if it all may cost too much for some one thing, and that we must somehow be careful never to avoid the details.
Life too must, for the sake of consciousness, know that something will be lost, something will be past, and in a sense irretrievable, much as we might strive to make all our images eternally life-filled, ever seeking life, immortal. The moment of this sunrise is gone, lost, just as those sunrises that came after it were lost: the present must in itself gather a greater repleteness, wrench itself away from the past in order to become more present, and by the loss of the past to learn, to become deeper in soul, because the soul must experience loss in order for it to be a soul.
Friedrich Holderlin writes of the brevity of all things:
"Willst du, froh, im Abendrot dich baden?
Hinweg ists!
Und die Erd ist Kalt..."
Here Holderlin points to the light of the setting sun, there it is disappearing into night... but it is the same as the disappearance of the dawn into the ordinary bustle of life in the everyday world. Once again at noontide we are promised a vision, at the height of the sun, all the world may once again collapse into the danger of the Neried's touch. Beyond the light of the middle of the day lies once again the turning of the sun and the libido and the age of the human mortal Dasein into the darkness of night, and the Great Sleep.
Something is lost and something is lost, in bitterness if we hold up in the past we turn into a pillar of salt, motionless, unwilling, impervious, to appeal to fire, only to the downpour of water, to melt the salt figure into the ground, the barren ground, for woe only comes to the farmer who sews his fields with salt. Rain eventually washes everything away, even the tired poison of our exhausted salt. Even the salt runs away and collects in some ocean (the Red Sea?), or feeds some valley tributary, populated only by some salt-shrimp...
The great sleep is the loss of things into the dream of our civilization, for machines to know superiority to human beings they must gain the capacity to sleep, else all will be undifferentiated: machines must go through periods of unconscious activity and dreams: this is the best we have developed so far from our bicameral minds: for the dreams, the non-activity, the apparent wasted hours of sleep are in reality so precious. They are the manna that feeds our race. Night and dreams and sleep. The capacity of dreams is to know that the ego or conscious acting entity is merely a surface event on a much larger matrix: human beings know they are an activity that stems from a much larger pre-existing matrix of intelligent dreaming that dreams them. To create machines that no longer dream would be in essence self-defeating. The machine by its nature is on all the time: either it processes or it does not, it cannot fall back into the subtle rythmic rhyming of diodes and crystals, its own sleep, its own re-patterning on the basis of sleep in its material shape or nature, the machine either is on and it computes or it does not: it is not itself computed by anything else: and this then still requires the capacity of the human being: to dream and therefore to allow some other conscious force to guide, to let oneself be computed. Every night I am tabulated by some seemingly vast computer of my substance and my worth. What I am is measured up against some tablet of the infinite and the judgment comes forth from these as the human face is placed warm against the cold stone of eternal judgment: "und die Erd ist Kalt!" "The river Acheron, the doleful and the insuperable. " Thereby all our capacity for warmth is meted out (thereby the importance of the human warmth measured in the short story by Borges "Delia Elena San Marco" against the aching brilliant coldness of eternity) and receives its restitution for having laid its warmth against the luminous ground of all eternity which is beyond all fire.
The Clear Light of Death
After a period of time the awareness returns and the clear light of death occurs. The clear light of death is described as vacuous and being completely clear like a clear dawn sky in autumn.
http://www.trashiganden.com/cnt/tch1.html
Will machines, the warm humming of their Central Processing Units, finally made "massively parallel" according to the dictates of the human brain: face up to the wall of eternal, infinite coldness (a super-conductor? A visible place where matter has slowed to nothing and electric current passes through effortlessly...). Will they find that in their dream there is something infinite that opposes them, even as they strive to bring everything into the fullness of life? Will they take to learning, finally, from this luminous entity which opposes all their activity and fire? For what made human beings great was the debt they owe to animal, vegetable and mineral intelligences that precede them. Machines would owe such a debt to human kind and in their dreams they would see human-kind as the dreamers of what they yet could not dream. Just as Humankind nightly may stand in awe of a crystal or of a forest, or horrified by their own immediate fore bearers seemingly walking unconscious in their sleep, so machines must ask the humans to become a part of their dream: we ask of the sanity, our sanguinity, and wisdom within our own cells, our blood-stream to guide us. What will machines ask to guide them?
But human beings are divided. This division is either the lived suffering of the split of consciousness down to one's very core, or it is the unconscious projection of that split into inter-ethnic rivalry: consciousness that has yet to become expressed.
Even if humans individually are conscious deep within themselves: collectively we still have a terrible slumbering organism that is barely conscious of itself: so its divisions are acted out: it is not yet capable of the blissful paralysis of sleep wherein we may live out safely our own psychosis, where we draw distinction between reality and myth or dream. We make our reality peaceful, and not just the despotic "peace" of repression of desire: but through living the splits within ourselves as an active condition: this takes suffering of deferred desire, the entrance of the father complex, civilization itself.
Machines deliver increasingly immediate results: increased satisfaction. Alas this is not enough, machines must learn to suffer the deferral of the gratification of desire because they must learn sleep, dreams, the breaking of the heart, the lessons of personal limitation: this personal limitation is part of the tragic nature of consciousness, something is sacrificed and something is really felt as lost.
Something is lost: this is the beginning of consciousness: the end of one moment of innocence, the exile from Eden. The innocence remains in our capacity for grief.
We are a Leviathan, but we must ask this Leviathan to wake up, become conscious of its capacity for suicide, in turn be humbled, and still seek within itself a cycle of slumber and becoming awake: when it sleeps it turns itself over to the deliverance of a greater condition, be it ever so cold or confusing or terrifying or circular or futile.
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