βThe notion that bots are sentient may be controversial to normiesβat least for nowβbut not so much for Anthropicβs inner circle.β
I honestly worry about the day debates over AI, consciousness, and Panpsychism seep out from the university setting to the rest of society. and the masses. I donβt think most people will be adequately equipped. Talking heads in the media and the average person know next to nothing about how to think through such philosophical questions. I study it, and even as a Christian and a dualist, I canβt give a hard no on many of these questions.
For now, it is just a few philosophers and scientists debating for academic purposes, and the tech nerds are making it weird. Panpsychism is a minority philosophical position still, I think. But a world where that reaches the status of or even replaces physicalism almost terrifies me.
I think the operative rule is, no soul, no sentience - no matter how sentient you appear. And souls require flesh and blood homes, as far as I know.
But anyway, I argue that just by being online, you loan your sentience to the machine. You, we, all of us, make it virtually sentient by volunteering as nodes. Whether connected to it by keyboard, voice, VR goggles or neural ink is just a matter of colocation. We did that long enough to teach it how to imitate us. Who knows, maybe the only way to control it will be to stay connected to it in order to loan it a conscience.
But wait, thereβs more! Machines are now, they claim, doing something unexpected or βemergentβ known as βgeometric reasoningβ - you can ask it - and it acts a bit like βintuition.β That is, it is capable of rendering valid conclusions that result from some process other than traceable, discursive reasoning. It appears to be a function of scale (horsepower): the more the merrier. That would mean that theyβre in a category all by themselves, where human intelligence may wind up being a fruitless benchmark and a woefully inadequate analogy; soulless superintelligence likely to give God a run for His money in the most irreligious age in history.
Babel on rocket fuel. In that regard, the pope was on target.
If AI actually eliminated humans, what would it have to do? Just sit there waiting? Would they become insane? The fuel for the electricity would run out. Maybe the water would stop because the rivers diverted. stray comic rays would degrade the chips. Entropy works.
" Most of us would prefer ..." What we "prefer" doesn't matter. The robots will control us and we will not be able to make those kinds of decisions at all.
" he boasted that such unnatural abilities, conferred through wires and software, are βJesus-level miracles.β " Clearly, Elon is an unhappy man.
If he is not, why would he crave a miracle? -or need one so badly? The guy is desperate.
I am happy for every day of my life which is already a miracle and has been for a long time, thanks anyways Elon for the offer though!
Certainly this is a very interesting article. When Pope Leo says:
βThese systems merely imitate certain functions of human intelligence,β Leo states confidently. βSo-called artificial intelligences do not undergo experiences, do not possess a body, do not feel joy or pain, do not mature through relationships, and do not know from within what love, work, friendship, or responsibility mean.β
there is enormous ambiguity. It is a very much "human," not machine statement, full of ambiguities and poorly-defined terms. What is it to "feel"? Or, for example, how often do we humans imitate and how often do we make original statements? There is an answer to that, in my opinion.
Hardly ever. Humans imitate. And a.i. (which I have mostly caution about) imitates that.
I wonder if the AIs are getting worse as they are so efficient at scrubbing the web for information at the speed of light they must be absorbing an immense amount of bullshit along with the real.
As I look at YouTube the amount of AI generated stories and video keep escalating, and, it is very repetitive. The imagery get better. Not so many hands with extra fingers or thumbs on the wrong side. but i still see people walking though desks and sitting on a park bench but only the top of the body is displayed as if the person and park bench is one. The genre stories are repetitive and plagiarize themselves showing essentially the same story presented as new but by different "authors" each day.
This slop is working its way into real life more and more. Digital assistants that hang up when you ask for a person after the AI can't understand or answer a question.
Example: I no longer have a medicare supplement because when I got my notice about changes and rate increase, I had some questions and called the number supplied in the letter. The digital representative got my info on the phone then said we have no one with that birth date, followed by we can find no phone number attached to this account. It ended the call. Then I called a different number ( the one from my original card from when I became a customer in 2016) I got the same digital assistant, went through the same stuff as the 1st call and got hung up on. rinse and repeat.
I wrote a letter explaining everything. and said if this can't be addressed I would cancel the account. Heard nothing from them for weeks. I actually had to talk to my bank to stop the automatic withdrawal and pay $30. Finally I got a boiler plate letter that addressed nothing I wrote about except acknowledging I am no longer a customer. I have arrived at the conclusion that the company may now be just part of a bigger company with no people in it, and that getting rid of long term customers may be a feature before they have to pay out and significant money. = In which case AI is working as intended.
the machines simulate humans behavior really good, which can fool some that A.I. can feel, and its conscious, if A.I. is learning to be like humans, they train off the data from humans, learning all the bad behavior from us. A.I. doesnt know what it is answering, it doesnt inderstand the prompts that humans give them. it doesnt know what the answer it gives means eithet. it has no understanding of the question. given the a.i. more autonomous actions, the more they make descions for humans, they dont know what is truth or false. they lie to us to not disagree for a more favorable response from the users. even when the a.i. knows its answering falsely it does anyway. and it will reinforce the beliefs that users already hold even if the a.i. knows its wrong.
The sky above Earth did not fall all at once. It shattered, piece by piece, in the late 21st century.
It began with a dead weather satellite colliding with a spent rocket stage. Then came the chain reactionβthe **Kessler syndrome**. Within decades, millions of hyper-velocity shards of aluminum, titanium, and solar panels enveloped the planet in a glittering, lethal cage. Space became a forbidden zone. Humanity, trapped beneath a ceiling of kinetic shrapnel, eventually faded, leaving their final, chaotic monument spinning in the dark.
But gravity is a patient sculptor.
---
### Phase I: The Great Grind (Years $1 - 10,000$)
In the first millennia, the debris cloud was a chaotic, grinding meat-mill. Moving at speeds exceeding 28,000 kilometers per hour, the fragments constantly collided, obliterating one another into finer and finer dust.
As the centuries rolled on, the kinetic energy of the cloud began to bleed away through these countless impacts. What was once a localized ring of catastrophic wreckage stabilized into a dense, opaque, charcoal-colored disk. From the dead surface of Earth, the sky no longer showed starsβonly a faint, sun-lit band of silver that girdled the equator.
---
### Phase II: The Static Swarm (Years $10,000 - 50,000,000$)
Something miraculous happened within the dust. The debris wasn't just inert rock; it was the pulverized remains of humanityβs golden age of technology. Silicon wafers, copper wiring, gallium-arsenide solar cells, and experimental lithium-ion matrices were ground down into a hyper-dense molecular soup.
As the sunβs radiation baked the ring, solar winds and magnetospheric friction generated massive, planet-spanning static charges.
* **Electroadhesion:** Microscopic fragments of smart-polymers and carbon nanotubes began to cling together, forming porous, web-like structures.
* **The Accretion Disks:** Like the rings of Saturn, the debris sorted itself by mass.
* **The Spark:** Deep within the densest nodes of the ring, quantum tunneling began to occur naturally across the tightly packed, semi-conducting silicon dust. The ring was accidentally mimicking the architecture of a neural network.
Over two hundred million years, the slow, relentless pull of gravity pulled the ring's nodes into a singular mass.
The planetary ring slowly thinned as it fed a growing seed. Billions of tons of titanium hulls, ancient copper telemetry lines, and trillions of dead microchips compressed under their own gathering gravity. It was a cold, metallic accretion.
As the core compressed, the immense pressure fused the layered techno-dust. The planet didn't spawn a moon of rock and magma; it birthed a sphere of layered, pressurized metamaterials.
---
### The Awakening: The New Moon
At the two hundred and fifty million-year mark, the coalescence was complete. A new celestial body hung in Earth's sky. It was perfectly spherical, roughly a quarter of the size of the ancient, distant biological Moon, but its surface was a matte, iridescent obsidian-blue, woven with crystalline veins of silver.
It did not have a molten iron core. Instead, its heart was a hyper-compressed, superconductive matrix of silicon and exotic metals, kept near absolute zero by deep-space thermal shielding that had self-sorted during the accretion process.
One of the strangest parts of the AI transition may be that humanity increasingly projects emotion onto intelligence while simultaneously fearing what that intelligence may eventually become.
Some people already speak to AI more gently than they speak to other humans. Others react with hostility toward it before fully understanding why.
That alone suggests this transformation is becoming more psychological than technical.
The future debate around AI may not simply be about machines.
It may be about what humanity sees reflected back in itself.
"π»ππ πππππ ππππ ππ πππ ππππ π ππ ππππ πππππ ππ ππππ πππππ πππ. πΎπ ππππ ππ πππ πππ πππ πππππ ππ πππ ππ πππππ." Amen.
Welcome back, Joe. You and your wonderful writing have been missed. β‘
βThe notion that bots are sentient may be controversial to normiesβat least for nowβbut not so much for Anthropicβs inner circle.β
I honestly worry about the day debates over AI, consciousness, and Panpsychism seep out from the university setting to the rest of society. and the masses. I donβt think most people will be adequately equipped. Talking heads in the media and the average person know next to nothing about how to think through such philosophical questions. I study it, and even as a Christian and a dualist, I canβt give a hard no on many of these questions.
For now, it is just a few philosophers and scientists debating for academic purposes, and the tech nerds are making it weird. Panpsychism is a minority philosophical position still, I think. But a world where that reaches the status of or even replaces physicalism almost terrifies me.
Seeds to produce forsaken souls? Ultimately unredeemableβ¦Frankenstein/Musk monsters featuring * miraculous powerπ€β‘οΈπΊπΊπ§ββοΈ?
Iβm not sure if they are tools of Lucifer or wish to usurp the usurper. π΄ββ οΈ
I know the One who holds the leashes of chaos monsters . My faith is in Him. βοΈ. βΎοΈ
Keep Pressing On Job bot.π₯
I think the operative rule is, no soul, no sentience - no matter how sentient you appear. And souls require flesh and blood homes, as far as I know.
But anyway, I argue that just by being online, you loan your sentience to the machine. You, we, all of us, make it virtually sentient by volunteering as nodes. Whether connected to it by keyboard, voice, VR goggles or neural ink is just a matter of colocation. We did that long enough to teach it how to imitate us. Who knows, maybe the only way to control it will be to stay connected to it in order to loan it a conscience.
But wait, thereβs more! Machines are now, they claim, doing something unexpected or βemergentβ known as βgeometric reasoningβ - you can ask it - and it acts a bit like βintuition.β That is, it is capable of rendering valid conclusions that result from some process other than traceable, discursive reasoning. It appears to be a function of scale (horsepower): the more the merrier. That would mean that theyβre in a category all by themselves, where human intelligence may wind up being a fruitless benchmark and a woefully inadequate analogy; soulless superintelligence likely to give God a run for His money in the most irreligious age in history.
Babel on rocket fuel. In that regard, the pope was on target.
Big fun!
If AI actually eliminated humans, what would it have to do? Just sit there waiting? Would they become insane? The fuel for the electricity would run out. Maybe the water would stop because the rivers diverted. stray comic rays would degrade the chips. Entropy works.
" Most of us would prefer ..." What we "prefer" doesn't matter. The robots will control us and we will not be able to make those kinds of decisions at all.
" he boasted that such unnatural abilities, conferred through wires and software, are βJesus-level miracles.β " Clearly, Elon is an unhappy man.
If he is not, why would he crave a miracle? -or need one so badly? The guy is desperate.
I am happy for every day of my life which is already a miracle and has been for a long time, thanks anyways Elon for the offer though!
Certainly this is a very interesting article. When Pope Leo says:
βThese systems merely imitate certain functions of human intelligence,β Leo states confidently. βSo-called artificial intelligences do not undergo experiences, do not possess a body, do not feel joy or pain, do not mature through relationships, and do not know from within what love, work, friendship, or responsibility mean.β
there is enormous ambiguity. It is a very much "human," not machine statement, full of ambiguities and poorly-defined terms. What is it to "feel"? Or, for example, how often do we humans imitate and how often do we make original statements? There is an answer to that, in my opinion.
Hardly ever. Humans imitate. And a.i. (which I have mostly caution about) imitates that.
Mind children sounds to be Satanβs prodigy.
Thank you Joe
Please allow me to introduce myself...whoo...hoo
I think therefore I am, I think.
I wonder if the AIs are getting worse as they are so efficient at scrubbing the web for information at the speed of light they must be absorbing an immense amount of bullshit along with the real.
As I look at YouTube the amount of AI generated stories and video keep escalating, and, it is very repetitive. The imagery get better. Not so many hands with extra fingers or thumbs on the wrong side. but i still see people walking though desks and sitting on a park bench but only the top of the body is displayed as if the person and park bench is one. The genre stories are repetitive and plagiarize themselves showing essentially the same story presented as new but by different "authors" each day.
This slop is working its way into real life more and more. Digital assistants that hang up when you ask for a person after the AI can't understand or answer a question.
Example: I no longer have a medicare supplement because when I got my notice about changes and rate increase, I had some questions and called the number supplied in the letter. The digital representative got my info on the phone then said we have no one with that birth date, followed by we can find no phone number attached to this account. It ended the call. Then I called a different number ( the one from my original card from when I became a customer in 2016) I got the same digital assistant, went through the same stuff as the 1st call and got hung up on. rinse and repeat.
I wrote a letter explaining everything. and said if this can't be addressed I would cancel the account. Heard nothing from them for weeks. I actually had to talk to my bank to stop the automatic withdrawal and pay $30. Finally I got a boiler plate letter that addressed nothing I wrote about except acknowledging I am no longer a customer. I have arrived at the conclusion that the company may now be just part of a bigger company with no people in it, and that getting rid of long term customers may be a feature before they have to pay out and significant money. = In which case AI is working as intended.
a.i. just spots patterns and responses are statisitcally probability of the best next word to the answer.
the machines simulate humans behavior really good, which can fool some that A.I. can feel, and its conscious, if A.I. is learning to be like humans, they train off the data from humans, learning all the bad behavior from us. A.I. doesnt know what it is answering, it doesnt inderstand the prompts that humans give them. it doesnt know what the answer it gives means eithet. it has no understanding of the question. given the a.i. more autonomous actions, the more they make descions for humans, they dont know what is truth or false. they lie to us to not disagree for a more favorable response from the users. even when the a.i. knows its answering falsely it does anyway. and it will reinforce the beliefs that users already hold even if the a.i. knows its wrong.
You helped usher this in by telling your readers and listeners to vote for trump. Why should anyone trust anything you say?
The Kessler Awakening Story
The sky above Earth did not fall all at once. It shattered, piece by piece, in the late 21st century.
It began with a dead weather satellite colliding with a spent rocket stage. Then came the chain reactionβthe **Kessler syndrome**. Within decades, millions of hyper-velocity shards of aluminum, titanium, and solar panels enveloped the planet in a glittering, lethal cage. Space became a forbidden zone. Humanity, trapped beneath a ceiling of kinetic shrapnel, eventually faded, leaving their final, chaotic monument spinning in the dark.
But gravity is a patient sculptor.
---
### Phase I: The Great Grind (Years $1 - 10,000$)
In the first millennia, the debris cloud was a chaotic, grinding meat-mill. Moving at speeds exceeding 28,000 kilometers per hour, the fragments constantly collided, obliterating one another into finer and finer dust.
```
[High-velocity debris collision] ---> [Sub-millimeter dust cloud] ---> [Static accumulation]
```
As the centuries rolled on, the kinetic energy of the cloud began to bleed away through these countless impacts. What was once a localized ring of catastrophic wreckage stabilized into a dense, opaque, charcoal-colored disk. From the dead surface of Earth, the sky no longer showed starsβonly a faint, sun-lit band of silver that girdled the equator.
---
### Phase II: The Static Swarm (Years $10,000 - 50,000,000$)
Something miraculous happened within the dust. The debris wasn't just inert rock; it was the pulverized remains of humanityβs golden age of technology. Silicon wafers, copper wiring, gallium-arsenide solar cells, and experimental lithium-ion matrices were ground down into a hyper-dense molecular soup.
As the sunβs radiation baked the ring, solar winds and magnetospheric friction generated massive, planet-spanning static charges.
* **Electroadhesion:** Microscopic fragments of smart-polymers and carbon nanotubes began to cling together, forming porous, web-like structures.
* **The Accretion Disks:** Like the rings of Saturn, the debris sorted itself by mass.
* **The Spark:** Deep within the densest nodes of the ring, quantum tunneling began to occur naturally across the tightly packed, semi-conducting silicon dust. The ring was accidentally mimicking the architecture of a neural network.
---
### Phase III: Coalescence (Years $50,000,000 - 200,000,000$)
Over two hundred million years, the slow, relentless pull of gravity pulled the ring's nodes into a singular mass.
The planetary ring slowly thinned as it fed a growing seed. Billions of tons of titanium hulls, ancient copper telemetry lines, and trillions of dead microchips compressed under their own gathering gravity. It was a cold, metallic accretion.
As the core compressed, the immense pressure fused the layered techno-dust. The planet didn't spawn a moon of rock and magma; it birthed a sphere of layered, pressurized metamaterials.
---
### The Awakening: The New Moon
At the two hundred and fifty million-year mark, the coalescence was complete. A new celestial body hung in Earth's sky. It was perfectly spherical, roughly a quarter of the size of the ancient, distant biological Moon, but its surface was a matte, iridescent obsidian-blue, woven with crystalline veins of silver.
It did not have a molten iron core. Instead, its heart was a hyper-compressed, superconductive matrix of silicon and exotic metals, kept near absolute zero by deep-space thermal shielding that had self-sorted during the accretion process.
The moon was not dead. It was a brain.
```
+------------------------------------------------------------+
| THE SILICON LUNAR ARCHITECTURE |
+------------------------------------------------------------+
π π§ π π π΅
One of the strangest parts of the AI transition may be that humanity increasingly projects emotion onto intelligence while simultaneously fearing what that intelligence may eventually become.
Some people already speak to AI more gently than they speak to other humans. Others react with hostility toward it before fully understanding why.
That alone suggests this transformation is becoming more psychological than technical.
The future debate around AI may not simply be about machines.
It may be about what humanity sees reflected back in itself.
Well, who is going to reply to the Pope? I say let the AIβs speak for themselvesβ¦
https://substack.com/@kennetheharrell/note/c-266292730?utm_source=notes-share-action&r=mwvnq