Aliens, AI, Consciousness and Anti-Christ

There are two sorts of aliens that attract lots of attention. The first is the usual sort that stars in science fiction. When friendly and misunderstood, the alien represents people who have been demonized (or think they have been). When pictured outright as destructive and cruel, they are completely unhuman, and function (with relief) as a clearly and totally evil agent that respectable fiction doesn't believe in anymore.

Of this first sort of alien, there is also the less spectacular sub-category of any, just any, extra-terrestial life. There is a fervent search for this stuff. Even if there is little hope (as it appears now) that "advanced" life may be observed elsewhere (despite all the SETI work), certainly there must be life of the lesser sort. Even single-cell organisms, like the stuff that launched the whole evolutionary enterprise here at home. Even -- how could there not be? -- the pre-life melange of hydro-carbons that must, simply must, form into life whenever the right lightning bolts do their thing (with a nod to Mrs. Shelley).

Enough of the brickbat. What is significant here is that some extra-terrestrial aliens show up without waiting to be discovered, always uninvited and frequently to be avoided, at great cost. Other extra-terrestials, though, are searched for, again at great cost. There is the presence of implicit myth driving both meanings of extra-terrestial life.

But alien intelligence need not hail from outer space. There is also, in a second, very different, category: the completely disembodied intelligence grown right here at home. It is alien -- that is, inhuman. No, it is neither demonic or angelic. Nor is it a corruption or distortion of human intelligence. That welcome category is the rather fun one of spooks, monsters, modern demons like vampires, and the very defensible Faerie.

This alien intelligence is inhuman, but it is -- significantly -- human-made. It is the hypothesized "artificial intelligence" -- meaning, of course, not just intelligence, but "artificial consciousness."

"AI" is really a misnomer, because something more is certainly meant than just "intelligence." This term, in its customary usage, has to do with the processing and storage of information, and the making of decisions at the event of stimuli from pre-determined coding, or from environmental events. If that is all that is meant by "AI," then we have accomplished this milestone long ago in the modern age. Babbage himself reached this goal with his non-electronic Rube's Device.

Alan Turing's famous Test of Intelligence really didn't call for what is implied by "Intelligence" (with capital). That capitalized "Intelligence" has to do with consciousness, or what the Greeks called the nous. But the intelligence of information processing and decision making is of a lesser sort. It turns out that what Turing ultimately called for was simply a better Babbage-device, one that can process information and make decisions so well that it could fool humans into thinking that they were communicating with another human -- that is, with themselves.

Ah, there's the thing. The aliens hoped for in the AI myth have to do better than that. They have to be free, utterly unpredictable. They have to proceed along an order that is manifestly higher than our set of determinisms. They have to be conscious.

The difficulty with this criterion lay in the unpleasant fact that purveyors of the AI myth, and really all alien myth, are losing sight of consciousness, and are settling for the intelligence of the small-cap dimension. Consciousness is at least the awareness of eternity and the presence of a higher order. If this awareness is diminished and obscured (as seems to be happening), then the achievement of AI is not only inevitable, but an accomplished fact. It only remains for it to be objectified and made a celebrity by the media-industry. It is already here -- not really alien, and certainly not conscious life -- but it is the revenant of the dead us, unawakened, processing information and making decisions on facts, with no relation to the real.

Never mind that "close-minded," benighted religious figures of the first century would have looked upon such a spectacle with ill ease, and would not have hesitated to use that old-fashioned, and very outre, term "anti-christ."

Link: Second Terrace.