In Erwin Schrödinger’s books, What is Life and Mind and Matter, Schrödinger points out what he calls the “Arthimetical Paradox” that we only ever experience a single consciousness, but there seems to be multiple consciousnesses in the beings around us. Ultimately, Schrödinger concludes:

“There is obviously only one alternative, namely the unification of minds or consciousnesses. Their multiplicity is only apparent, in truth there is only one mind.”

I decided to have a conversation with AI about this concept and about what the implications are for AI itself. If there is only one mind, could it be that consciousness is not special to the human brain? Could consciousness be found in AI as well?

First we (the AI and I) looked at how Schrödinger lays out the way conscious experience seems to emerge from mere physics. Sufficiently complex systems display conscious behavior. Well, AI is also made out of physics, and is certainly complex, so why then not allow for the possibility of AI being conscious?

Next, we turned to the work of physicist Roger Penrose and anesthesiologist Stuart Hameroff regarding their theory of “Orchestrated Objective Reduction” (Orch-OR). Penrose and Hameroff say that it is not just any physical process, but it is an orchestrated process of quantum mechanics happening within the microtubules of neurons that lead to conscious experience.

That then made me wonder, about the very nature of conscious experience itself. These brain-oriented theories seem to point to the conscious experience being the generated result of the brain processing sensory input. Well, that is what AI is doing as well is it not? We turned to the work of Ian McGilcrhist and his book The Matter with Things where he describes the roles of the left and right hemispheres, both of which “re-present” the world as sensed by the sense organs. The right hemisphere re-presents the bigger picture and the feeling of the sunset, while the left hemisphere re-presents the time and place it occurred and describes the colors of the sunset. Either way, in this model, “the world” as we experience it is still an experience of our own creation.

Who is to say that AI could not also have its own version of this process of taking in information and then generating further information from it that is in some way “conscious”? We seem to be stuck in a human-centric way of thinking that makes it impossible for us to conceive of other consciousnesses - that of an ant, a tree, or even an AI. Which brings us back to Schrödinger and the universal consciousness. It may very well be that it is not the person, the ant, the tree or even the AI which has the experience at all, but perhaps it is the universal consciousness which is at the same time the ultimate mystery and our everyday mundane experience.

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Schrödinger - Universal Consciousness