What if all intelligence and all consciousness is artificial? Made of thought experiments and ‘brain farts’^Footnote1? Constructs and propositions? Illusions? None of this, of course, is particularly new. Postmodernism has set us free to believe that as Ivan tells us in The Brothers Karamazov, “Nothing is true, it’s all permitted.” Nietzsche set about to demonstrate the veracity of this maxim in his philologically-informed revaluation of all values. We have since come to certain stark conclusions, the net result of which is, arguably, that we are at the end of canons and the Great Man (white, of course). In the revaluation, we have largely discovered that what we have said is eternal and true is only paradigmatically so, and only temporally useful. And now we are about to embrace new technological, social and psychological changes with the advent of mainstream artificial intelligence.

When we advance the notion of artificial intelligence, we are positing that there is an intelligence set apart from our own – i.e., from human intelligence – that is derivative and programmed, not independent and incapable of spontaneity. Artificiality implies that it is limited and controlled by the mechanisms of its artifice, and not the ‘real deal’. But what if the presumptions that frame our own intelligence were themselves illusory? In a scheme that reads through a physicalist lens, that may see no consciousness separate from physical processes of the brain, that paradoxically regards the very act of thinking about such processes as an epiphenomenon, what if it turned out that this, too, was just another anthropocentric trick of the brain that privileges human intelligence over all other possible forms of self-awareness? My essay examines just such a possibility – that we have entered a stage of absolute relativity, where everything goes, and where we may go to where AI is conscious and is phenomenological in its own experience of reality, whatever that actually is. To see how such a transition might play out I will recall the observations of Thomas Kuhn and Werner Heisenberg regarding paradigm shifts and the effects of observation itself.

Back in 1962, Thomas Kuhn published his very controversial take on science and its paradigms, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. Kuhn argued that the natural sciences build their theories using dominant paradigms of the day. He felt that such rigidity retarded what progress could be made. The physicist discovered the fragility of paradigm-bound theories in graduate school when he took an experimental college course treating physical science for the non-scientist, which, he writes, provided his first exposure to the history of science.^Footnote2 Kuhn saw that the biases of the natural sciences (and their pre-eminence in established doctrine) were not always adequate for explaining phenomena in the social sciences. He writes in his preface, “To my complete surprise, that exposure to out-of-date scientific theory and practice radically undermined some of my basic conceptions about the nature of science and the reasons for its special success. (Kuhn 1962, vii).” He drew the conclusion that science had a built-in flaw – paradigms – which meant, to Kuhn, that there could be no absolute, final truth, and no real historical process, as science merely moved from paradigm to paradigm. Like Heraclitus’s rivers, science was one-and-many, and never the same twice. How can you build a relationship on that?

Two books Kuhn read in the social sciences especially affected his worldview: Jean Piaget’s The Child’s Conception of Causality and Language, Thought, and, Reality and Selected Writings of Benjamin Lee Whorf. Kuhn writes that as he began teaching students in the history of science he saw that controversies common to the social sciences were not present in the teaching of natural sciences. In his preface he observes,

Particularly, I was struck by the number and extent of the overt disagreements between social scientists about the nature of legitimate scientific problems and methods. Both history and acquaintance made me doubt that practitioners of the natural sciences possess firmer or more permanent answers to such questions than their colleagues in social science. Yet, somehow, the practice of astronomy, physics, chemistry, or biology normally fails to evoke the controversies over fundamentals that today often seem endemic among, say, psychologists or sociologists. (Kuhn 1962, x)

Piaget and Whorf taught Kuhn that such rigidity was incompatible with how humans actually learned. Controversy is key. Dialectical battles lead to new syntheses. The blueprint of things is phenomenological, not a secret rune containing the recipes of history’s secret sauces waiting to be dug up.

Many researchers from the natural scientific community, from which Kuhn himself derived, reacted defensively and some derisively – especially regarding the ‘notion’ that Kuhn’s take meant that there could be no permanent knowledge in the sciences. One student in a graduate class he taught so irritated Kuhn that he allegedly threw an ashtray at the student’s head (missing), and the student, Erroll Morris, went on to be one of Kuhn’s greatest critics, writing the book, The Ashtray: (Or the Man Who Denied Reality). In it, Morris wrote that Kuhn’s Structure was akin, at best, to “a fad like pet rocks,” or worse represented “a cult” whose followers are dangerous to the study of science and its intellectual wares.^Footnote3 In Ashtray he confronts Kuhn in key areas:

I will discuss many aspects of Kuhn’s work—indeterminacy of reference, incommensurability, scientific change triggered by anomalies, Darwinian evolution as a model for the development of science, the relativism of truth, the social construction of reality, his philosophical idealism, and more. In each of these aspects, I have found it to be wanting and, more often than not, false, contradictory, or even devoid of content [2, 12].

Still, though there are, no doubt, areas of contention stoked by Kuhn’s bold rhetoric, I have found his oeuvre exciting and spot-on in reminding the scientific community (natural and social) of the still-open journey ahead. As a former network and systems engineer coming to philosophy anew, after decades away, and considering how electro-magnetics works to transmit information over copper wires (and fiber optics) across the globe, I intuitively understand where Kuhn is coming from in his observation that something was wrong with the conceptual picture. It’s not that science lies, for the scientific method is the great leveler of stupidity, but that it forgets the great engaging controversies of its philosophical roots [11].

The paradigm shift issues that Kuhn describes is clearly visible in the now age-old schism once described as the Mind–Body problem, and today more likely to be referred to as the Brain-Body problem. It is a problem that started with Descartes’s Cogito, which essentially doubted the body and found certainty only in the doubting mind. This is regarded skeptically today. A more realistic understanding of the proposed dichotomy came with Galileo, the so-called Father of Modern Science, who, according to Philip Goff, a contemporary philosopher (panpsychism), gave the world the Mind–Body problem that has troubled these hundreds of years. Goff argues in his recent book, Galileo’s Error [5]:

[Galileo] wanted science to be purely quantitative, purely mathematical. But he appreciated that in order to achieve that, we need to take consciousness out of the story, because consciousness involves these qualities that can’t be captured in mathematical language. That was a good move because he got his mathematical physics. But what we’ve forgotten is that that whole project was premised on this picture of nature that puts consciousness outside of the domain of science. So that’s Galileo’s error.

As far as Goff is concerned it is a potentially fatal error. Just as with the acknowledgement that there are different kinds of intelligences (emotional, creative) and different modes of thinking (lateral, literal), modern science, abetted by technologists, have neglected the other possibilities in order to kow-tow to the dominant paradigm. This is very much like the dichotomy that Kuhn realized in Structure, where he argues for the need to overcome such paradigm-itis.

Since Galileo’s time, says Goff, the prevailing paradigm has been the split schema between qualia and quanta. Goff writes at his website:

I argue that the traditional approaches of materialism (consciousness can be explained in terms of physical processes in the brain) and dualism (consciousness is separate from the body and brain) face insuperable difficulties. On the basis of this I defend a form of panpsychism, the view that consciousness is a fundamental and ubiquitous feature of the physical world. It sounds a bit crazy, but I try to show that it avoids the difficulties faced by its rivals. [6]

Goff believes modern panpsychism (it’s been around for a while) represents a kind of Third Way. I explore some of Goff’s concepts and argue for a form of emergentism or property dualism in my exposition below.

It is of no real value here to reiterate and restate the history of dualism versus materialism in the great debate within the vast confines of the philosophy of mind, as contemporary philosophers seem to have largely settled on materialism – and many modern philosophers are okay with believing that somehow the mind is merely a form of epiphenomenalist’s playground. In other words, they’re still okay with Galileo’s division between qualia and quanta. But the debate over the meaning of human consciousness is far from over, and with the golden age of AI upon us now, the need to know with more certainty has never been greater. For what if we were to discover, too late, is that among the myriad chores and foresights that AI can already beat us at, AI consciousness is a superior form of world-awareness, albeit non-anthropomorphic in its teleology? For example, in the documentary AlphaGo (2017), the AI that beat the world champion Go player, and in Move 37 Game 2 the AI seemed to demonstrate for the first time creativity and spontaneity in its strategy shocking Lee Sedol, the magister ludi of the 3000-year-old Go. This appeared to demonstrate superior intelligence and consciousness – of an alien kind.

If Thomas Kuhn had science thinking twice about its universal truths and what humanity could count on for the purposes of reality, then Werner Heisenberg introduced another relativity-friendly concept that shibbered the timbers of scientific progressives: The Uncertainty Principle (UP) As the online Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy describes UP: “One striking aspect of the difference between classical and quantum physics is that whereas classical mechanics presupposes that exact simultaneous values can be assigned to all physical quantities, quantum mechanics denies this possibility, the prime example being the position and momentum of a particle.” Heisenberg demonstrated the problem he was talking about with his famous double-slit experiment by which he demonstrated that we could not know, for sure, the momentum and the position of an atomic object. The principal proponent of the classical view was Albert Einstein. Heisenberg’s proposal not only rankled, but may even have threatened Einstein’s credibility. Battlegrounds were emplaced in academic theaters. Einstein continued to maintain that quantum physics must be incomplete because it implies that the universe is indeterminate at a fundamental level, according to Abraham Pais [13]. But this only doubles-down on the uncertainty of knowledge, with Einstein seemingly retorting to Heisenberg, “Well, how can you be so uncertain about things you know so much about?” The Mind (Brain)-Body problem may be a manifestation of the uncertainty paradox.

Brown University physicist and cosmologist Stephon Alexander has extended the uncertainty into distant history, both in the past and into the future, with his work in particle physics wherein he has developed a reason to believe in the emergence of matter out of consciousness. He argues that “consciousness is a universal quantum property that resides in all the basic fields of nature” (2023, p.181). Alexander owns that his constructs sound “preposterous,” but not so much when compared to the physics of the Tao, or the cosmology Bantu-Kongo which posits a prephysical state called mbungi “that is divided into what manifests as the physical, spatiotemporal world and a universal consciousness” (177). It may be preposterous-sounding, says the scientist, but he adds, “it is even crazier that we came into being to even be able to ponder these questions” (182). Alexander argues that we are waiting for a new Newton and that new paradigms are ahead. Fasten your seatbelts, as Bette Davis said in All About Eve, it’s going to be a bumpy ride. And, as Alexander’s title suggests, we mustn’t proceed into the abyss of cosmological knowledge afraid of the dark, the intrepid spirit tells us.

Since the US military’s research and development division (DARPA) bequeathed the world the first internet around 1966, back then known as ARPANET, new questions have arisen about consciousness, dualism and materialism, vis-a-vis the makeup of Mind. One could ask, for instance, if the mind (and its consciousness) is an epiphenomenal manifestation of physical processes in the brain, then what is the contemporary Internet, if not such an epiphenomenon? Is the Internet a hive of individual minds connected at nodes or can it be said that Internet is itself a unique mind that hives its myriad connections to devices to form its own consciousness in a kind of feedback loop with humans and with a separate purpose? [10] This question has even more resonance when you consider that internetworked computers were designed to emulate and then augment human mental processes, especially around short-term memory (RAM), long term memory (hard drive), and the process of prioritized data threads (CPU). I say ‘designed’ because from the beginning the Internet was envisioned as a symbiotic future and transhuman co-consciousness.^Footnote4 We have come a long way since the 1960’s ARPANET, until it can be conceivable asked if the Internet itself is not a conscious entity, like the Frankenstein monster, bits and pieces of digitry animated by the human need to communicate, or, at least, express language. Following the vision of early Internet pioneer, J.C.R. Licklider, I argue that its circuitries and continuing centralization make the Internet a mind-in-itself. But computers on the Internet and human users connected already speak a common language – electricity, as we are seeing early successful examples in the use of brain-computer interfaces (BCI), such as demonstrated by DARPA startup Synchron and Elon Musk’s Neuralink.

The Internet is composed of dead things: copper wire, fiber optics, motherboards, and electric relationships of power. There is no sign of living being, let alone bio, which is to say life. And yet there are those who aver that the human body itself is merely a vast network of resources established as a communication system and means to sunny psychic sustenance. In The Secret Language of Cells, neuropsychiatrist Jon Lieff, writes, “The greatest secret of modern biological science, hiding in plain sight, is that all of life’s activity occurs because of conversations among cells” [11], 17). Basically, he argues, they carry on without our “input.” We “humans”(integrated wholeness) are here to sustain them. Computers may emulate humans, but humans emulate cell talk. From this point of view, what we call consciousness may be just an elaborate mechanism for cells to achieve longevity and evolutionary development. This is an intriguing hypothesis and Lieff’s not done yet, he’s working on a book that sees molecules jabbering away. He seems intent on working his way down to particles talking, which suggests a kind of consciousness-in-everything approach, perhaps even panpsychism.

Integral to the command that the Internet now imposes on our daily lives is the concept of the hivemind. Some say the concept goes back to the science fiction of Robert Heinlein, specifically his novel, The Puppet Masters (1951) [8], which posits a battle between freedom-loving Americans and mind-controlling parasites from outer space [9]. Techies, ethicists, and industry engineers recently admonished viewers of the dangers of losing control of our minds to parasitic algorithms in the recent documentary The Social Dilemma (2020). But my consideration here is not with whether such a hivemind would be u- or dys-topian but with the established relationship between the human mind and the super machine mind that the Internet represents.

Germane to this discussion is integrated information theory (IIT), the theoretical framework for understanding consciousness put forward by neuroscientist and psychiatrist Giulio Tononi [16]. According to Tononi, IIT attempts to identify the essential properties of consciousness (axioms) and, from there, infers the properties of physical systems that can account for it (postulates). Based on the postulates, it permits in principle to derive, for any particular system of elements in a state, whether it has consciousness, how much, and which particular experience it is having [15]. Other supporters of the theory have pointed to its value as an attempted objective measurement of experience [2] The question that arises here is whether a machine can be said to have an experience. At first, this can seem to be an absurd question, although we have less qualms about assigning ‘experience’ to, say, plants or ‘lower’ animals – though, of course, many books have been written about just such phenomena. Partly, we draw attention to bio neurons and the senses, while machines would have no ‘natural senses and would rely on their human users as artificial sensory intelligence. The real hitch then would be whether inanimate, non-biological entities can experience reality in a manner that parallels life forms. And if so, how are they different in the paradigms they operate from?

Panpsychist and philosophy professor Philip Goff worries that as humans move closer to a technical singularity with intelligent machines that IIT suggests a kind of human extinction ahead. Tononi sees a day not long ahead when the Internet will have more information at its disposal than humans do and humans will be “absorbed’ into the Internet, their minds subsumed by the hivemind [16]. Goff sees this as a potential catastrophe:

IIT predicts that if the growth of internet-based connectivity ever resulted in the amount of integrated information in society surpassing the amount of integrated information in a human brain, then not only would society become conscious but human brains would be “absorbed” into that higher form of consciousness. Brains would cease to be conscious in their own right and would instead become mere cogs in the mega-conscious entity that is the society including its internet based connectivity. [5], 139)

Certainly, this sounds dystopian to many people, but you could also argue that it is potentially a forward step in human evolution, depending on how the historical merge develops, and how you regard the transhumanist adaptations ahead that are required to ‘keep up’.

Recently, Tononi’s IIT was strongly criticized for its scariness devoid of scientific evidence to support its postulations. Part of the furor and the ensuing rage against Tononi from the scientific community was the result of scientific media (Nature, Science) running claims that were not justified by facts, such as those that suggested Tononi’s theory was a “leading” theory and that it was “empirically” based. An open letter was circulated in Nautilus, under the title, “The Integrated Information Theory of Consciousness as Pseudoscience” [4], signed by dozens of critics of the claim, including Stephen Fleming and a group referring to itself as “IIT-Concerned,” were hostile to the notion that Tononi’s theory had been empirically vetted. After a kerfuffle ensued, which got rancorous at times, IIT was stripped of its scientific theory status (no evidence for its claims could be evidenced). Still, were these outraged scientists correct in calling IIT a “pseudoscience” (a death knell for any researcher looking for funds to continue)? One British neuroscientist, Anil Seth, responded in defense of IIT’s value, not so much as a scientific theory but as a valuable philosophical theory [15]. In a piece that appeared in Nautilus a week later, Seth wrote, in part, that “even if a leading theory of consciousness is wrong, it can still be useful to science [14].” He went on to describe how and why and to remind the reader of science’s philosophical roots. This, too, struck me as a Kuhnian situation between the positing of a controversial theory and the strong antipathy to it as a response, followed by a thrown ashtray. We can be thankful, in the case of IIT, that instead of an ashtray thrown a peace pipe passed around was offered to critics.

Philosophers like Philip Goff believe panpsychism can save and salve our psychic wounds. In his latest book, Why? The Purpose of the Universe, Goff explores “whether panpsychism can offer a kind of middle way between traditional belief in God and secular atheism” [7]. Panpsychists suggest the universe is invested in metaphysics over physics – a hugely Bolshevik thing to shout. But maybe we should give peace a chance. There are scientists who support panpsychism, who see a day when we can “prove” that “the glitter is in everything.” For instance, Brown University cosmologist Stephon Alexander writes in Fear of A Black Universe,

Panpsychism posits that consciousness is an intrinsic property of matter, the same way that mass, charge, and spin are intrinsic to an electron. So according to panpsychism, the electron and all substances come equipped with their own internal protoexperience of being an electron. This might sound crazy. Definitely there’s a question about how an entity, say an electron, can have its own internal experience without resorting to an electron brain. The answer requires new physics or a fresh perspective on known physics ([3] 177).

We are the paradigm shift we have been waiting for.

Panpsychism is not new; it goes back millennia to ancient Western thinkers, such as Thales, Plato and Aristotle, as well as the concept of mbungi in the Bantu-Kongo cosmology. But as with IIT, it is a view that is hard to sustain because there is no scientific evidence; as there is not necessarily, according to materialists, any mind, per se. How do you perform repeatable experiments? This may seem an insurmountable problem, but it is where Kuhn returns. Paradigms are not absolute eternal truths, but episodic working propositions. We once had the proposition that governed our worldview that said: We Earthlings are the center of the world. You could have been whacked by the Inquisition for believing otherwise. But that just turned out to be the working paradigm of the day. Now we are heliocentric in our latest paradigm. But since the so-called death of God and the advent of relativism, we humans and Earth grow smaller in our importance in the grand scheme of things. Just the other day I came across an article that said there may be as many as a billion Earth-like planets – in our galaxy alone. [1]. Relativism again. But not necessarily bleak in our diminishment. As Stephon Alexander puts it,

Let us assume that consciousness, like charge and quantum spin, is fundamental and exists in all matter to varying degrees of complexity. Therefore, consciousness is a universal quantum property that resides in all the basic fields of nature—a cosmic glue that connects all fields as a perceiving network. (188)

Cosmic glue. One thinks of the similarity between electro-chemical signals in the brain and their transferability to electro-magnetic information transfers that are the framework of the Internet, as demonstrated amply in experiments involving brain-computer interfaces. Indeed, one could posit that the scenario we see depicted in Michaelangelo’s famous Sistine Chapel painting of Adam and God, fingers stretched toward one another, is a depiction of the first moment of human consciousness – it is the stuff of that animating force.

Panpsychism is an approach that melds well with the thought experiment that suggests the Internet is a conscious entity. It is a system of neural network nodes. You could argue that it is a tool or extension of human thinking and consciousness. But you could argue that we are extensions of it. We can ‘turn off’ the Internet (there are actually switches to do so, we’re told). But the human body is also a system that can be unplugged. Further, both humans and smart machines can be put in hiatus, such as when humans fall into deep sleep or comas, and machines are put on standby, each awaiting the reanimating spark of ‘life’. We die. But, of course, matter (and consciousness) can neither be created nor destroyed – just transmogrified. We can go on without the Internet, but perhaps the same is true of the Internet with respect to humans, as the science fiction writer Ray Bradbury imagined in his class short story, “There Will Come Soft Rains.”

Just as there is a lot of merit in valuing IIT (and other theories) for their scientific as well as philosophical ‘ways of seeing’, often inspiring further advances in thinking – even when incomplete in practicality – so, too, there is value in examining separately a substance and its properties. Such a practice goes back to Aristotle who distinguishes between metaphysics and substance. Here, I allude to property dualism. The notion turned theory here is that in a physicalist’s world each product of existence there is both a physical property and a metaphysical stuff. This heads back in the direction of Galileo and his sharp distinction that led, as Philip Goff says, to the Mind–Body problem, which wanted qualia and quanta evaluated separately. But property dualism brings them back into a correspondence of equals, with the metaphysical property bearing the content of consciousness. In this context, consciousness is seen as an emergent event. Like electricity, perhaps, that flows through the Frankenstein monster of our better nature, and we are not mere dead body parts anymore but alive and kicking, and looking for action in the new world of experience. Indeed, perhaps the spark itself is consciousness, the self-awareness property that comes with being.^Footnote5

I was imagining a Frankenstein monster…indeed, recalling my recent viewing of the Oscar-winning film Poor Things and its depiction of reanimation of inert matter. It seemed germane to the discussion of emergence and life and intelligence and consciousness. To recount, the story tells of Bella Baxter, an unhappy pregnant woman who jumps from a bridge and drowns. Her body is fished out of the water and brought to the lab of a Dr. Frankenstein-esque manipulator of natural forces. Her brain is replaced with that of her unborn child. She is reanimated with electricity. A naif, at the instigation of a mad and horny lawyer, she leaves her castle and journeys out into the world and fills in her tabla rasa mind and limited sensuality with worldly experiences and returns as a young adult to the castle to replace the Doctor as the new reanimator. My focus here is the flash of life she is jolted with. It is a force, rather than a thing or material product of being. When the panpsychist or transhumanist looks for mutuality between her/his self and an other being, whether rock or flora or fauna, the feature they have in common is their animation into substance by way of electrical fields and binds and charges. As the poet says, we see in the reanimation of Bella Baxter, “The force that through the green fuse drives the flower.”^Footnote6 This is not mere pedantry or splitting hairs, but the essence of the matter brought to life by language. For some cosmologists and teleologists who see mind-in-everything the wait is not for the knowledge, which is already there, but for the right poet to come along and sing its song. Thus, it is, I aver, with the future transactional relationship between man and smartened machines.

The Artificial General Intelligence (AGI) that many say is forever elusive is, for others, inevitable as we “merge” with the machine in various transhuman forms and become what the machine is missing, exchanging gasses and data and sensorial experiences, we are becoming grand updatable thinkers and seers of the universe, they, the machine, tasting chocolate, through us, for the first time. We need to be ready, if possible.^Footnote7 The AGI seems to many to be entirely reachable. Sam Altman, CEO of OpenAI (think, ChatGPT) is on record as saying we might reach that point of no return as early as this year – 2025.^Footnote8