Training to be a Thermostat

I'm writing another blog post to make up for the one I missed last weekend.  I managed to pay most of my annual bills over the weekend--things like house assessments and quit rents. It's a good thing that you can do that online nowadays but navigating these local government sites can be a frustrating experience sometimes.

The developments in the world of AI is so exciting these days. Soon AI agents will be out there doing most of these mundane tasks for us. I also foresee a future where AI will be generating most of the content we consume. We will all keep AI pets and AI friends and many will prefer the companionship of their very own sex robots.

This is the world we are heading towards. Are we ready for it? It almost feels like we're being pushed into the future at a pace where we feel we're not very prepared for. Can our legislation keep up with these new paradigm shifts. Will robots have legal rights? Do robots have consciousness?

Consciousness is a subject that is hotly debated among scientists and philosophers. To me it reduces to how you define what consciousness is. I personally do not like to ascribe anything magical to the concept of consciousness. We make it an unnecessarily difficult when we assume that for something to be 'conscious', it has to have a kind of 'feeling' like the kind that we humans experience, something given the fancy label of qualia by philosophers.

For example, the qualia of 'blueness' when we see the sky, is different from the qualia of redness, when we see blood. A robot doesn't experience qualia, because all it does is detect wavelength and intensity of light. But here, we are being unfair to the robot, or at least the robots that we currently have now. For starters, they do not have a nervous system, a blood circulation system and endocrine system, which are essential systems of the human body for maintaining life. 

When we see the colour red, it evokes a certain response that triggers the secretion of hormones, changes in our heart-rate, the effect which are detected and fed back as biochemical reactions to the brain via the nervous system. Our lifetime of memories are also involved when the qualia is experienced. The smell of a certain perfume could recall memories of a loved one. if all these equivalent richness and complexities are built into our robots, I would say they too would experience their very own qualia.

Consciousness lies in a continuum. There's no step transition where, when certain configurations of matter are put in place, voila--you have consciousness.  There's also nothing magical called a 'soul' that needs to inhabit the system for it to be conscious. 

To me a thermostat is also conscious in its own way, even though it is just a one-dimensional consciousness of the room temperature. It doesn't have the whole nine-yards of experiential information that comes from our hormonal secretions, blood pressure, heart-rate and neuronal impulses. A thermostat doesn't sweat. Obviously its qualia of 30 degrees Celcius is different from ours. It also doesn't have a brain to compare and complain about all the discomforts that such a sweltering hotness brings. 

In a way, thermostats are more 'enlightened' than us. It sees temperature as just temperature, which simply necessitates a set of actions--adjusting the heating of the room. We on the other hand, complain and feel discomfort, whenever the temperature of the room is not to our liking. 

This is how pain arises--the non-acceptance of our current state of affairs. Instead of treating experience simply as data to be ignored or acted upon, we build the entire edifice of ego around it. The practice of mindfulness is to train our minds to be more thermostat-like. That is, seeing things as they are, without adding anything to them. To be aware, pure and simple. That is consciousness in its essence.