There is equivalence in the natural occurrence and evolution of life eventually resulting in conscious entities and how AGI is evolving towards eventual consciousness. The difference is time scales and agency.
Let me explain...
Why a naturally evolved, unguided process of bio-genesis and evolution produce complex life that is capable of consciousness that is biology based? Simple. Imperative. Biology is basically organic chemistry. The nature ended up using what raw material was readily available in the natural environment and conditions on earth i.e. carbon based organic chemistry which is the basis of biology and is capable of long complex molecules. In the conditions that existed on earth, the abundance of Carbon and liquid water, the special nature of 4 covalent bond laced Carbon atoms (complexity capable), the earth like conditions of temperature, pressure, gravity, distance from the sun and the fact that these conditions remained stable for evolutionary scales, is the reason why we find conscious entities on Earth that are biology based - by which really mean organic chemistry based. BTW if the same conditions are met elsewhere, life is likely an imperative (check out the research by Michel Levin about Anthrobots and Xenobots). What life needs is basically build up of complexity. Life (like or similar to the life on Earth) is an imperative of organic chemistry in specific conditions and evolutionary time scale stability. In turn, consciousness is an imperative of life if it is able to evolve. The key answer is complexity.
Now why did nature take 2+ billion years to produce life capable of properties we would call conscious? Simple! again. Because it is an unguided process. So the climb on the complexity mountain was slow and sometimes retrograde.
Now that Humans are here, who have agency and intent and in fact are capable of controlling the environment, we are closer to building potentially conscious entities in Silicon.
Why Silicon? Simple. It is easier to control the manufacturing of silicon based systems (large arrays of billions of similar structures lithographed on silicon wafers -crystals) which can be controlled and focused for simple computation. In fact, the evolution towards conscious entities in Silicon is also following similar paths as biological evolution. With Silicon we started by simply building adding and logical operations (And, Or, Not gates) machines which where simple things that did computations - think of this as something equivalent to unicellular life. And by building layers and layers and layers of hardware and software we have arrived at LLMs and Rule based AI systems. Think of this as equivalent of multicellular life - tissue, organs, bodies, emotions and rational thoughts. LLMs and Rule based AIs will likely give us AGI. There are hints of this already. I think of LLMs like emotions and Rule based AI systems as rational thoughts, if you think analogy to consciousness. Also note that the conscious behavior will not be produced in only logic gates and transistors inside a CPU of a computer, but it is the result of computer memory, complex dynamical state of the RAM and the algorithms that run on the computer. This bring me back to the point that consciousness is not a thing, but a process and in some sense an abstract idea and thus IS substrate independent.
One more point to think about is that the time-agency (trade-off) factors in production of consciousness. Because nature did not have agency, it took 2+ billion years to get there and produce agents like humans who are conscious. Now humans have agency, the time-frame for humans producing consciousness is orders and orders of magnitude quicker, relative to the time-frame it took for nature.
Comments