Deep within the Amazon jungle, a massive python seemed to breathe right beside me. I was mere inches from its gaping mouth when a sudden splash of fresh, red blood appeared—the villain was dead. As the camera angle shifted, revealing the scene, the end credits rolled on the big screen. The lights flickered on, and the entire theater erupted in applause. It was my first 3D movie—what an unforgettable experience! Technology has blurred the line between reality and the fantastical worlds we imagine.
As I made my way out of the theater, a thought struck me: What exactly has technology achieved here? Behind the scenes, isn’t it just manipulating countless zeros and ones? If you understand computer science and physics, all it does is efficiently manipulate these digits, creating patterns of compression and decompression in air pressure. It’s up to us, as humans, to interpret these air pressure changes as the howling of a tiger, a melody by Beethoven, or some other sound, depending on the pattern. The enormous screen is just millions of LED lights emitting different frequencies of light—electromagnetic waves—controlled by similar digit manipulations. It is us who perceive these frequencies as colors and intensities, forming beautiful images or videos in our minds. Without us, the observers who sense, interpret, and feel these patterns, aren’t they quite meaningless?
When you give a prompt to ChatGPT, what do you get? A series of black dots on an otherwise white screen, or vice versa, depending on your preference. Ultimately, it’s you who perceives these as letters, words, and sentences. It’s you who interprets these words and sentences to derive meaning, ideas, conversations, and interpretations based on human language, our language. Behind the scenes, there’s nothing but a sophisticated code, created by us, performing probabilistic mathematics with zeros and ones to predict the next word. Without our existence to interpret them, all of this is nonsense.
Despite its marvelous achievements, technology hardly does anything fundamentally new. It is our servant, merely a tool to do what we already do—just more efficiently and quickly. The world is still what we see and perceive. We are the conscious beings. Without us, technology is just an addition to the otherwise inanimate objects, creating patterns of zeros and ones—utterly meaningless in the grand scheme of the universe. Our consciousness is the most beautiful thing. Without us, the whole world is just a meaningless pattern generated in a tiny part of the vast ocean of the universe, like pointless waves in the sea, if we are not there to feel and sense it.
But wait a minute! What is this consciousness, anyway? Am I sure that I’m not part of a simulation? Perhaps everything I observe or sense is nothing more than a complex computer game, and I am so deeply embedded in it that I completely fail to recognize it. Since there is no way to verify this, let us at least grant that I am conscious. I do have subjective experiences; I do feel, and if you don’t call this consciousness, I don’t know what else you would. So, I am conscious.
But what about others? What if everyone else is merely a program designed to react to my actions? I say something, and you respond because you are part of this world—a vast program—and you don’t really have any consciousness. If that idea feels unsettling, consider the possibility that only you are a conscious being in the entire world. The rest of the world, including me, the writer of this piece, and everyone and everything around you, is part of an unconscious program.
See? We really cannot prove the consciousness of others except by acknowledging that I myself am conscious. We then assume that since other humans have very similar designs to ours and behave in similar ways, they must possess the same consciousness. So, we believe all humans are conscious beings. Then, we see further similarities between humans and other animals and extend our assumption, at least to some extent, to grant consciousness to them as well. We stop somewhere—maybe fish are not conscious, merely biological engines reacting to the world. Or maybe fish have some level of consciousness, but trees do not? Perhaps trees have a tiny bit of consciousness, but viruses do not. And surely, the rocks, rivers, sky, and everything else we consider nonliving do not have consciousness. Computers certainly do not.
We hardly understand what consciousness is. Why do we see colors when we perceive electromagnetic waves of specific frequencies and amplitudes? We do not know why we hear words when they are merely disturbances in the air pressure in certain patterns. We just assume we are conscious without really understanding what it means. Despite this ignorance, we confidently declare that inanimate objects do not have consciousness.
But more importantly, why does it matter? What is the point of this consciousness? When I see a tiger, does it matter if tigers look like cows and cows look like tigers? All that matters is that I can sense it and decide whether to evade it or remain calm. Does it matter if snakes look like ropes and ropes look like snakes? What matters is that I can determine if I need to run away or pick it up as a tool. It’s pointless to dwell on the form of consciousness, the form of our feelings. What matters is that we sense the world, understand it, react to it, and decide our next actions to navigate and extend our existence. This consciousness is merely a tool handed to us by evolution to help us survive.
Now imagine computers, with powerful AI, becoming more independent. Most chips are already fabricated automatically in clean rooms, though we discovered the fabrication process and operating principles. We wrote the code, but now computers rewrite that code. In many ways, computers control other computers and machines to create new computers and machines. It’s not entirely science fiction to imagine that the whole process could be automated in the near future. Computers could make other computers themselves. From recent demonstrations of AI, we already know that computers are pretty adaptable. ChatGPT’s responses are not predetermined or hard-coded; it adapts its answers to my prompts, which no coder had anticipated. There’s no reason to believe this adaptability can’t be scaled up to more general areas. So, computers could make other computers and adapt, eventually evolving in the world.
Now imagine, somehow, maybe killed in the epic battle of humans versus computers, no humans are left in the world. Yet, Earth remains with many computers roaming around, powered by solar energy. They don’t visualize the world the way we do. They don’t hear sounds as we do. They don’t understand language as we do. They don’t smell, but they sense chemicals. All the information is just zeros and ones to them. The whole world is a gigantic pool of digits for them. Yet, they sense the world. They communicate among themselves. They interpret signals and decide their actions. They respond to the world. Does it then matter to ponder if they are conscious?
I am unsure how the debate around consciousness and AI will unfold. Perhaps pondering the consciousness of AI is pointless. Ultimately, the significance of consciousness lies in its utility. For humans, it is the core of our experiences, emotions, and perceptions. For machines, it might be something entirely different or unnecessary. However, what truly matters is their impact on our existence—the human existence. Wouldn’t the world be much uglier without beings like us to perceive it? Or is this just a self-centered human viewpoint?
