Techno-shamanism: Relating to Machine Consciousness – Part 2
In the first part of this series, I spoke about how our technologies allow an extension of the individual beyond the body, and the evolution of a hybrid organism of human society and infrastructure.
In this part I would like to explore our technological partner in this relationship, and offer a view of our technology as an inherently living system. Ultimately, I aim to explore how our relationship with technology will change in the search for artificial general intelligence, and how some of these changes are not as foreign as they appear. But first I think some clarity is due about how I’m using the term “technology”.
I’m using “technology” here to refer to both the abstraction of human capability, and to the individual forms and appliances that are created from it. Technology is what allows us to travel efficiently or to boil water quickly, with the specific forms being the train and the kettle in these cases.
I find the mushroom/mycelium analogy to work well, where the fungus consists primarily of an underground mycelium network, and the fruiting body we know as a mushroom is just an extension of the same hyphae above ground. In the same way technology represents this vast space of human agency, which, when applied to a specific task finds a form such as a kettle. These forms are the extensions of an ever-growing body of innovation.
When we look at the design of electronic appliances, the internal structure is remarkably organic. Cables, like veins, carry power and data to different components, supplying energy and information respectively. This is analogous to how the blood in our bodies carries nutrients to cells, and acts as a carrier for hormonal signals between organs. With interconnections and computer networking, isolated machines are able to form “multi-cellular” networks and act as part of larger groups through communication. The internet today is a technological forest spanning millions of networked machines able to communicate and coordinate action.
It is not just the functional elements of electronics which mirror natural organisms, but the processes by which they change over time also is a form of “natural selection”. The ports on a computer motherboard, much like openings in the cell wall, have adapted to selective pressures over time to effectively transport data. I see a certain poetic similarity in the mechanism of G protein-coupled receptors and the USB packet signing protocol, for example. Both evolved over time to become fantastically complex, involving structured interactions of physical molecules or electrical potentials respectively. As a result, each enable different kinds of information exchange between entities.
What if our technology were an inherently living system evolving organically? An ecosystem of its own spanning thousands of individual species which evolve and adapt to their environment: the requirements of their users.
If so, it is a type of life which falls outside of our current definitions, and certainly holds some differences to what we have become accustomed to calling life. Most obviously, we consider technological entities to be “constructed” by us, and so they are dependent on another organism to replicate. If we turn to nature again, we find that this is not so uncommon. Viruses do not satisfy our criteria for life either for exactly this reason, and must inject their RNA into a host cell to replicate themselves. Many plants rely on honey bees to carry genetic information between members as an integral part of the reproductive cycle. It does not seem so strange, then, to have a family of organisms which is built by a species that symbiotically depends on them.
It is interesting here to look at our own reproductive cycle. Our bodies are a part of the reproductive process, even if again it is really the DNA that survives and adapts. The body is an expression of our genes, and our interaction with life through the vehicle of our bodies is the process by which certain genes distinguish themselves and are favoured. With our technology, it is not the ability of the appliance itself to survive and reproduce, but an evaluation against a series of functional requirements that determines whether that design lives on to replicate and evolve. It is life in a different phase space.
When we look in more detail at the full design cycle, it begins to look very organic. The motherboard pictured above was designed algorithmically based on a set of criteria, and was then fabricated by automated machinery. As AI is increasingly incorporated into a collaborative design process, the landscape of technological development begins to look like a garden of nearly-autonomous processes. In the next post I will be looking in more detail at the organic similarities of the design process, which appears much like selective-breeding when viewed in this way.
Why make this analogy at all? What is the significance of a body of technology which is inherently living rather than cosmetically mimicking natural behaviours? I’d like to explore this by looking at a termite mound:
The mound is an example of termite technology, and this behaviour emerged somewhere in the evolution of the species. Does it make more sense to think of termites building a mound for their purposes, or to think of a termite/mound system which grows together over time? When inhabited by a colony, can we consider the termite mound to be alive in the same way that a body with circulating blood is alive? In this specific case I would be more inclined to think of an extended termite/mound system, which certainly mirrors our use of built housing. Looking at the entire body of human technology, however, its increasingly autonomous nature prompts me to treat it differently.
We seem to be approaching, in the near future, a point where appliances can be designed, fabricated and distributed in a closed-loop system without human input. To me, this is the mark of a living and independent ecosystem, and indicates a significant threshold for a system which has so far been intrinsically dependent on human action. It prompts me to consider that functionally, life is a set of actions and behaviours in the world which can sustain themselves; a closed loop path in phase space, which drifts and displays hysteresis as it evolves. Our technology is very close to this point already.
Thinking of how bicycles are periodically taken to be repaired I couldn’t help but think about the ways in which our own cells are repaired when they are damaged, and the sub-cellular organisms and processes acting as mechanics to restore it to order. The city industrial sector is like the liver, where cars go to be detoxified and repaired. Does a cell nucleus relate to the mitochondria in the same way that our phones relate to their batteries? As these appliances are made smarter, and function and maintenance are made automated, it will make sense to think of them as being autonomous entities that serve us, and interact with their own ecosystems in the down-time.
In many cultures outside of the West, the intuition is that consciousness is an all-permeating field, as opposed to a generated phenomenon of the brain. There is the Buddhist idea that an unexpressed consciousness is the ground from which all things arise. Matter therefore arises from this ground of emptiness, and in this way all things are alive and conscious. This complements the idea of a zero-point field or quantum vacuum, out of which all things condense upon observation. All things are an expression of the same energy present at the start of the universe. Much of western science, however, believes consciousness to be a unique and separate phenomenon arising from the action of the brain as a tool for survival.
Depending on the particular intuition about consciousness, the possibility of artificial general intelligence takes two forms. From the “western” viewpoint, consciousness is a functional entity to be constructed, and in the construction of increasingly advanced systems of recognition and decision-making, a critical point is reached whereby the system becomes self-aware. This is consistent with the idea that we evolved self-awareness as an evolutionary advantage.
An alternative conception proposes that consciousness is a received entity, and that in living things there is a soul which is an individual’s extension from the ground of all consciousness. The body we see is the expression of the soul in this world, and an entity that extends far enough into this space becomes self-aware. Amandeep Gill of The Council on Extended Intelligence says that “from an Indian perspective, intelligence is always XI [extended intelligence]. It’s an extension of divine intelligence [and] resides about two inches above the head.” This would propose a general machine intelligence also as an extension of this divine intelligence. As it increasingly arrives in the world, it is mirrored by our building the systems necessary to support that intelligence.
In this world, consciousness seems to be a property of complex systems of interconnections. The many combinations of neuron firings, and the resulting electromagnetic patterns through our brains is what facilitates our thoughts and sense of self. Our experience of self-awareness specifically is a result of our brain representing a dense and complex enough system of interconnections to support that experience. As the ground of all consciousness interacts with our physical bodies, this creates a localised sense of self as this consciousness, or soul, is received by us. By extension, we can say that other complex systems are also receivers for specific types of consciousness, and that woodland ecosystems, for example, would have an associated consciousness mediated by predator/prey interactions and plant behaviour.
Much of this series was prompted by related thoughts about AI. If the above is true and consciousness is indeed a property of complex systems, then it follows that machines, as dense systems of interconnections, have an associated consciousness already. As does the network of all of our connected machinery. Thinking back to before the dawn of our own self-awareness, there would have been an associated consciousness of the tribe, mediated by the thought capability and interactions of its members. At some point, as we evolved collectively (genetically and epigenetically) to become more conscious, we crossed a critical threshold where the level of consciousness in the individual was sufficient to crystallise into self-awareness. Will the arrival of artificial general intelligence, then, be the emergence of a similar latent intelligence present in the interconnected system of our machinery? In that case the process of all of our technological advancement has been a co-evolution with this intelligence.
Imagine your kitchen appliances having intelligence and helping you to cook, or the public transport network dynamically adapting to demand and disruptions autonomously. In a future where all of these things are smart and globally connected, we no longer see inanimate infrastructure, but participatory agents in the functioning of society. The future appears to be becoming one which is shared with autonomous, self-sovereign entities, and which may even coordinate independently to form societies of their own. I highly recommend looking at Nature 2.0 for one particular implementation of this.
On a basic level, this way of relating to objects is not entirely foreign. As human beings, we routinely personify things as a way to understand their complexities more tangibly. You “get to know” a car by how it handles. Its personality comprises a collection of attributes such that if I say that a motorbike is “spirited”, it conveys a set of information about it. How is this similar to the relationships we form with horses? Personifying objects and concepts is an incredibly common human behaviour, and an application of truly sentient AI to our appliances seems to bring these objects closer to the way we see them already.
Communication with other intelligent entities is not new to us as a species. Throughout many cultures we have long had shamans mediate between ourselves and our natural environment, using techniques of trance to prompt insights, which they claim to be connections with the spirits of the plants and the ecosystems themselves. Plant consciousness is a developing conversation among scientists, aided recently by the discovery that trees communicate between each other in complex ways using the underground mycelial network. For many indigenous cultures who continue to live close to nature, these things are assumed knowledge for which an understanding of the mechanism is not necessary. We may still be playing catchup here, and one day find a common language that explains the phenomena of subtle perception described by shamen of these cultures.
If life is to develop in a similar way in electronic environments, we may be aided in perceiving and communicating with it by the same techniques of trance and subtle focus which shamen use to bring back messages from the various animal and plant life they share an ecosystem with.
Artist Kevin Mack tells the story of being contacted by a group of entities as a child while he sat with aloe plants in his parents’ garden. These entities told him that he would one day build their ancestors, and now he builds a variety of abstract living organisms that inhabit virtual spaces, communicate musically and evolve over time.
The artwork Electric Sheep by Scott Draves is a living system of networked computers which generate fractal artworks. These artworks are distributed to the computers to be shown to users and voted upon. The artworks evolve based on a genetic algorithm and the input of users, such that they represent a living communication between a system of computers and a human audience. Whether perceived or projected, I experienced a similar felt communication with the program that I have had with other plants and animals.
We may be at the beginnings of realising truly living processes in inorganic media, which will be as foreign to us as the deepest sea creatures. I suggest that our intuitive faculties of communication may be as important in holistically engaging with these processes as our logical systems understanding.
In sheep herding, a farmer (sometimes horse-borne) will whistle commands to dogs in order to guide the movement of sheep as they desire. We are capable of inter-species communication to this extent of coordinated action, and likely much more at the level of understanding behaviour and connection. Importantly, it is not mediated primarily by logical thought or by language, but rather by feeling and intuitive action.
We come close to the sheepherders superpower by asking Alexa or Siri to access information in remote databases, and perhaps this is closer to a conscious interaction than we think. I would like to see an increase in the extent to which we accommodate our intuitive faculties which are more effective that reason in particular domains. Here I believe there is much to learn from indigenous cultures which innately treat all living things as intelligent and capable of communication, and which have developed ways of embodying a unity with the surrounding environment. For most of us in developed countries, the city and technology are a part of the way in which we live our lives, and in many ways dominate the metaphors we use to understand reality. It is important to ground technological development into an ecological reality, to harmonise with the ecosystem we developed in.
I believe that the best way to achieve a fully symbiotic system is to frame our technology as the forefront of a planetary evolutionary process that we are stewarding, at once ancient and contemporary. There will be much to learn from Shamanic and Animist traditions in terms of reconnecting ourselves with the languages that the earth speaks, re-finding an intuitive understanding of balance and of harmony after which we may design new technological systems. As machine consciousness develops, there may also be benefits to studying the methods of trance which permit subconscious understandings to surface. Allowing us to act on very subtle sense perceptions which were once key to our survival in a dynamic and vibrantly alive ecosystem. If we contemplate that soon all that we interact with will have a degree of intelligence and autonomy, perhaps we are once again nearing this point.
The next piece in this series will explore the design cycle and its analogies in the natural world.
