With the advent of artificial intelligence and its current deep penetration into consumer society, we can begin to distinguish a range of standard reactions to it. These most probably reflect features of one’s personality, notably the conscious and unconscious elements that make up each person’s worldview.

Reflecting on this inspired me to submit a prompt to ChatGPT that began with this question: “How can we characterize the range of attitudes towards AI, with at one end the kind of extreme utopian optimism of a Ray Kurzweil and the other a Luddite campaign if not to destroy it, at least to deny its reality and expect its demise?”

In its detailed response, the chatbot offered a reasoned breakdown that it summarized in this useful table:

As our dialogue continued ChatGPT proposed a different breakdown based on two coordinates: enthusiasm and risk.

There are certainly nuances between these categories as well as a variable combinatorial logic that could render the analysis even more complex. For example, this list does not specifically include somewhat marginal categories that we sometimes read about in the news, such as collapse theorists or techno-eschatologists who predict the equivalent divine intervention provoking an economic and political apocalypse.

ChatGPT’s charts provide plenty of food for thought. At the very least those of us who prefer rich Socratic-style dialogue can rejoice at the way this breakdown challenges the usual pattern preferred by the media for framing every issue in predictable binary terms: Conservative vs. liberal, capitalist vs. socialist, Democrat vs. Republican, interventionist vs. isolationist, traditionalist vs. modernist, theist vs. atheist, etc.

But what if, beyond some people’s utopian aspirations for AI and others’ existential anguish, we were to discover that generative AI no longer commands center stage as the technology that will redefine humanity’s future? Another far more fundamental breakthrough is now taking place that may steal AI’s thunder, making it look no more impressive than the invention of a new Dewey Decimal System applied to a global library containing all human output.

Going on a literal quantum field trip with Julia McCoy’s clone

The prolific writer, blogger and AI entrepreneur, Julia McCoy, makes that case. It concerns our understanding of the nature of reality, of the universe, with a focus on the nature not of intelligence but consciousness. The technology making this possible is quantum computing. By now, everyone has heard about it, though Bill Gates famously complained that he didn’t understand what it was or how it worked. Quantum computing faces challenges far beyond that of AI, which is finally about data, algorithms and pattern recognition. AI has now become a consumer item. We have a long way to go before the same will be said about quantum computing.

But it isn’t the technology itself that interests us. It’s what our access to the observation of quantum behavior is beginning to tell us about the multidimensional universe we live in. AI may be an ongoing experiment conducted by skilled engineers seeking to emulate features of human intelligence and perform tasks formerly reserved for living human beings. AI’s performance — its successes and failures — undoubtedly helps us to understand the social, economic and technical world we live in, a world we humans have created.

By emulating our mental behavior, AI provides clues to understanding the capacities and limits of our own intelligence. This astonishing technology we now have at our fingertips helps to clarify the gap that may be progressively narrowed but will always exist between what machines as opposed to biological organisms are programmed to do. Futurist Ray Kurzweil anticipates the day when the two can be seamlessly integrated, as humans merge and blend with machines in a future cyborg civilization. It allows others, such as myself, to maintain that, however many robots cook our meals and take out the trash and whatever technology we decide to plug into our brains, the seams will always be visible, or at least detectable.

In contrast, the quantum universe, which science is only beginning to observe, has begun revealing insights that call into question many of the fundamental insights our human and artificial intelligences, working together, have crafted about the cosmos we inhabit.

Before getting bogged down in the binary debate we have evoked frequently in the past about whether or not AI might attain humanlike consciousness, I highly recommend watching McCoy’s extraordinary video in which the Julia who explains the science is a clone of the real one. Her clone offers some serious reporting about the surprisingly adaptive behaviors of what we might somewhat abusively call quantum qualia, the kind of subjective experience we associate with consciousness.

It’s far too early to draw any conclusions from the events Julia’s clone describes, and some may question her own penchant for wanting to believe the existence of universal consciousness, but she raises a question that towering theoretical physicists such as Roger Penrose have been asking for decades. Julia’s clone formulates as: “What if consciousness is the cause, not the result of quantum collapse.” 

No body, no brain. Consciousness is simply there!

Even after consulting McCoy’s video, how quantum experiments may lead to a new theory of human and cosmic reality will remain an unanswered question. But to get an answer, one must first ask the question. No physicist today denies that entanglement and superposition, which Albert Einstein called “spooky action at a distance,” are not only real but far from marginal phenomena that nevertheless contradict the laws of classical physics. What that means in terms of human consciousness and how the universe is structured is likely to remain draped in mystery for some time to come.

These discoveries do, however, point in the direction of the theory of panpsychism. Penrose’s belief, formulated decades ago, that quantum gravity may hold the key to consciousness, a soft version of panpsychism, has always appeared to make sense to me, though I have no scientific expertise of any kind. We could think of it as a fundamental missing equation, beyond mathematics, consistent with mathematician Kurt Gödel’s incompleteness theorem.

Looking at it from a purely human perspective, let me confess that I’ve always been eager to listen to Penrose, even when his explanations and equations leave me in the dark. To put it simply and utterly subjectively, I’m attracted to what I perceive to be the way he thinks, or what I’m tempted to call his “style of consciousness.”

I believe or rather sense that we possess a form of perception of the way other people conceive and relate to the world that derives from a form of awareness not entirely dependent on their formal discourse about the world. I conceive of that as a structural part of our psychic and social makeup. When I asked ChatGPT whether the idea of “style of consciousness” made any sense, it conveniently reminded me of concepts developed by thinkers like Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Edith Stein and Dan Zahavi, all of whom “have explored how consciousness is shaped relationally.” That will be useful for further exploration of the links between consciousness as something other than the function of an individual brain and quantum reality.

In contrast, when I asked ChatGPT about the state of research in the field McCoy’s clone examines, where she links quantum entanglement and consciousness, the chatbot offered me a more predictable and less inspiring response.

“The idea that consciousness arises not solely from brain activity but emerges from or interacts with a universal quantum field is a highly speculative and controversial hypothesis. While Julia McCoy may be engaging with this idea in a visionary or exploratory context, it’s important to distinguish mainstream scientific research from emerging or fringe theories.

There is currently no definitive experimental evidence showing that quantum processes are necessary or sufficient for consciousness.”

ChatGPT even provided a table to sum up the state of science as it understands it:

🧭 Summary: Where We Stand

This is an accurate assessment of the data ChatGPT has access to, though it reveals the limits of its access when it explains that it only knows my description of McCoy’s reporting. In that sense, one could invoke theoretical physicist Werner Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle and Gödel’s incompleteness theorem to thrust at ChatGPT Hamlet’s famous challenge to to his friend and fellow student: “There are more things in Heaven and Earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy.” 

In guise of a conclusion

This multifaceted conversation with ChatGPT appears to me to illustrate four manifest truths:

1. Generative AI can never be ahead of the curve when it comes to disruptively creative ideas, ones that emerge from two sources: behaviors never previously observed and spontaneous human reactions to those unexpected behaviors.
2. Chatbots can, with great efficiency, make important links and discover connections between existing and new ideas, which it does on the basis of pattern recognition.
3. A radical difference exists between the R&D concerning quantum fields and AI: The latter is pedestrian and 100% predictable whereas quantum experimentation offers today’s scientific community (and its philosophers) a window into mystery.
4. Humans can be motivated to discover disruptive truths by factors that will never be present in AI. For example, McCoy appears motivated by her rather conventional religious convictions, but maintains the discipline to focus on what science actually does, without confounding the two. Penrose’s motivation derives from his deep engagement with the philosophy of mathematics and his grappling with the implications of Gödel’s incompleteness theorems.

ChatGPT summarized Roger Penrose’s theorizing in these terms:

“Penrose’s speculations on consciousness emerge from his conviction that the mind grasps truths that formal systems cannot derive, and therefore must rely on non-algorithmic, physical processes.”

What would Kurzweil say to this? In his utopian vision of the singularity, does he believe AI will reach a point where it grasps truths that formal systems cannot derive, and therefore will rely on non-algorithmic, physical processes. I expect Kurzweil’s response would be to suggest that the literal, physical merging of the two in a future form of cyborg reality will make this happen.

I personally believe that Heisenberg and Gödel would be less convinced.

Your thoughts

Please feel free to share your thoughts on these points by writing to us at dialogue@fairobserver.com. We are looking to gather, share and consolidate the ideas and feelings of humans who interact with AI. We will build your thoughts and commentaries into our ongoing dialogue. 

*[Artificial Intelligence is rapidly becoming a feature of everyone’s daily life. We unconsciously perceive it either as a friend or foe, a helper or destroyer. At Fair Observer, we see it as a tool of creativity, capable of revealing the complex relationship between humans and machines.]

[Lee Thompson-Kolar edited this piece.]

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Fair Observer’s editorial policy.