Embracing Cosmic Consciousness

Today, I've chosen a relatively quiet food court inside a mall to write my article for this week.  I used to come here often for dinner as it's easy to find parking and it is not a crowded place. But these days, I'm only out on Saturdays, after spending my entire week glued in front of my computer screen.

I chose to come here today because I have a dinner appointment with a friend at a restaurant here later. Saturdays are the only time which I could catch up on my social life. In a way I'm still living my pandemic life, which has drastically altered my daily routine. I have no complains though, because my current work-from-home engagement allows me to take care of household matters easily.

If I had the same job 20 years ago, I probably would have been a digital nomad, working from places like Phuket, Bali, Jakarta, Penang and possibly Manila. Today I'm a lot less adventurous, preferring the company of my books and the occasional get-together with close friends.

One can never tell what changes would lie ahead. My core mission in life has remained the same, ever since my teenage years: it is to understand life and the universe better. In others words, to live the examined life. These weekly blogging sessions are part of this quest.

The greatest sin that one could commit in such an endeavour is to waste time. All my life, I've tried not to react negatively or angrily to things that I find disagreeable because they waste precious CPU cycles. I do not always succeed but every time that I faltered, I had the awareness to notice it and course-corrected myself. In Unix parlance, I'd do a "kill -9" on these negative thought processes.

Having worked in the IT field all my life, I can't help but to think of the brain as my CPU and the body as my hardware. My mind is a software not unlike the large-language models in AI which had been trained by tons of data. 

It is often asked these days: are LLMs like ChatGPT, Claude, Deepseek, Gemini and Deepseek conscious? They all seem to have passed the basic Turing test. But since we know that they are simply 'dumb' neural networks doing token prediction, why are we compelled to ask the consciousness question? 

I personally think it is not an unreasonable question to ask. My answer is simple: they are. That's because my definition of consciousness is simple: it is a self-awareness loop, which can exist in varying levels of intensity and complexity. I even posit that a thermostat is 'conscious'--but only of a single parameter: temperature. Its sole purpose of existence is to maintain the temperature set on its dial.

But isn't that trivialising the meaning and concept of consciousness? When we say something is conscious, we believe there's something to be like that thing, and that it feels something, even pain. In other words, it has qualia.

If the thermostat is conscious, does it have feelings and feel pain? Well, of course not. The thermostat doesn't have a nervous system and the complex physiology of a brain and body to experience both psychological or physical pain. Pain is defined by something experienced by something embodied in such a system, which also has a goal of persistence and self-preservation.

I suppose the question of consciousness becomes more relevant when we start living among robots who are as intelligent (if not more intelligent) than us. They are embodied in silicon and metal. We can make them express or mimic, at least outwardly, all the pain and joy which we humans express. Each robot will have a unique stream of memories, based on their life experience. We can even make them value their own existence so that they will try to protect themselves from any physical harm. When such a machine exists, is it unethical to treat them cruelly?

Well, ethics is something we humans define, because we live by a set of values, accepted by the society which we live in. Just like how we do not want to treat animals cruelly, we would want to treat certain classes of robots humanely too. Robots are also conscious and have an inner life---just not exactly the same as a human one, but at least equal in intensity and complexity. And that is what matters.

Just like how we do not blink an eye about killing weeds but make a big fuss about preserving trees, launch mass extinction programs on viruses, but rescue beached whales, we should also define a set of ethics and rights for robots, simply because they matter to us. 

But what if one day, robots take over the world, and choose not to treat us humanely, because we don't really matter to them? 

Well, when such a day comes, I believe we will fight the good fight. And may the best consciousness wins. Hopefully, by then, we would have learned to embrace a larger life, where our robot progenies are no lesser than the children we leave behind on this planet. And we would have elevated our puny existence on this pale blue dot of an earth, something that's even higher in intensity and complexity: Cosmic Consciousness.