A random thought
from a state of perpetual cognitive dissonance
At what point of time do neural firings in our brain transcend into actual feelings and thoughts in our minds?
What is it that actually makes us "human"? what makes these "experiences" experiences?
I believe in constructivism, we wouldn’t be human if not for our experiences. That being said, can AI ever truly be “human”? Many people would consent, because fundamentally, a piece of code only generates a single result depending on a choice from a binary set of outcomes, never more than that at a very fundamental level; and what science tells us as of now, is that, even we humans are fundamentally "human" because of our neurons firing, which is binary at its core; it fires or it doesn’t. Many people would disagree to the idea of a future where AI can become “human”, because how would they, could they ever feel? even the possible feeling outcomes for a given set of input experiences would be exhaustive in nature. limited. because that’s what a deterministic program does, unless the program rewrites itself, in which case, it’d be non deterministic; but even so, it would only be a result of big data analysis of millions of experiences having millions of different situational outcomes influenced by millions of unique feeling outcomes because can a piece of code, invent a new outcome? out of the blue? because of some minute aspect of some input experience? just like our thoughts moulded by our experiences, that do not always have meaning but are connected in a very ... very physical way or conceptual way or some intangible way..is this possible? heck, even feelings are unique and contextual and relative and cannot be absolutely, truly described because language is so lossy. I cannot even fathom. This makes me frustrated but excited at the same time, about the future, the possibilities, and the scope of exploration in the field of cognitive sciences, human informatics and even art and design if you think about it. I wouldn’t deny that we are a work of art and the fact that, by design, we are no more than a complex, very complex piece of biological code, yes, self rewriting code, working ourselves to improve other pieces of code and create new ones, new alternatives, new outcomes, constantly bugging, debugging, to eventually someday, decode and decipher ourselves.
I wonder how that day would look like.
