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Consciousness and Artificial Intelligence


by Swami Sarvapriyananda 

 "Yes. See, for me, AI is one more proof of the uniqueness of consciousness, and I'll tell you why. Notice what AI is doing now. It is replicating, imitating the highest functions of the human mind, you know, creativity. So what Javedji ( Famous Indian poet ) and others said, you know, there's one question you missed yesterday. Sonu Nigam ( famous Indian singer ) , Javedji, they said you'll never have AI doing poetry or music at the level of Sonu Nigam or Javed Akhtar. True. But what they also said was the ones who will be in trouble at the next level, the ones below that. So what about the B grade and C grade writers and poets and artisans and artists? How is it that AI is able to replicate, do work at that level? I was at the Museum of Modern Art in Manhattan a few weeks ago, and when you enter it, there's an AI. The first thing that you see is a big display like this, and AI has been fed all the art in MoMA. And when you go in there, it's continuously generating new quote-unquote art. And it's hypnotic. I stood there for a minute. You can see whole crowds, they said, is it art or not? So AI is doing that. AI is writing. Nowadays, here, I'm sure, and all in the United States and in Canada, all university departments, they are scratching their heads how to know whether the assignments written by the students are written by chat GPT or by the students. So AI is doing that. Creativity at multiple levels. Sora, somebody demonstrated that to me a few days back, and you saw it here. So my point here is every one of the higher faculties of the human mind, memory, intelligence, decision-making, self-driving cars, creativity, all are being demonstrated by AI at some level. Not at Javed Akhtar level, but at some level, some level, they're being demonstrated, except one faculty. Consciousness. Consciousness. These machines are not conscious. You say, how do you know, Swami? Are you in Silicon Valley? No. Ask the people in Silicon Valley. Ask people in Google and OpenAI. By the way, I don't know how true this is. Somebody told me, if you look up Sam Altman and his Twitter feed, X feed, so somebody asked him, tell us one thing that we don't know, which you believe to be true. And Sam Altman said, Atman is Brahman. He said that. Look it up. So now, consciousness is not there in any one of these machines. My question here is this precise question. Nobody's asking this question. Why not? Because if consciousness is just one more faculty of the mind, which can be explained by the brain, see, creativity is complex, decision making is complex and you are able to model that, imitate that algorithmically. Consciousness is simple. What does consciousness do? It does only one thing and only one thing. It gives you first person experience, Anubhava, experience. Why can't you model that? Why is it so difficult? And if you ask the programmers, they will tell you something terrible. They will say, let alone these machines being conscious, we have no idea where to begin. We have no traction on the problem at all. Doesn't that tell you that consciousness is something unique?"


reference : https://youtu.be/Co_kedLZaAo?si=t7Wrhf8Xi9M8s5BW

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