Art, AI and What It's Like to Be a Bat
It’s hard to have a deep discussion about artificial general intelligence (AGI) without bumping up against some form philosophical exploration into consciousness. The reductive side of the argument pulls on the thread that all that we feel or think is simply data and information that runs along pathways that are substrate independent. It can all be replicated if we assume something less than infinite computer processing power. The antireductionist side of the argument winds information and data into a sort of physical and mental conglomeration. Our thoughts are not just data. But instead whole body experiences piled on top of each other to establish something that resembles a soulful consciousness. When we look into the mirror what stares back at is us not a picture. But a representation of being. All the physiological inputs stare grinning into the daylight back at us in something that can’t be broken down into the sum of it’s parts.
I fall further down the path of the antireductionist side. Call me romantic. I see how seemingly invisible differences in how the physiological, emotional and memory stack up on top of each other in my autistic son to create an entirely different perception of the world. Scan after scan of his brain shows no difference from mine. But he is so impaired in certain ways and so perceptive in others and yet so normal in others that I struggle to determine if his world resembles mine at all. Thomas Nagle’s What it’s Like to Be a Bat argues, I can only perceive what it would be like for a human to see what it’s like to be a bat. But a brain formed entirely off the inputs of echolocation has nearly no frame of reference that matches with mine. There is no (0,0) point to step off from. One fear I have is that this is true of the difference between my son and I. Yet the overwhelming majority of the 7 billion humans alive live within a framework that allows us to see the world from each other’s eyes. How can that be the manifestation of discreet data inputs?
When I was 11, my Little League team won the championship. The tape (tape?) I listened to on my headphones in my room was U2’s The Joshua Tree. When I hear With or Without You 34 years later I can see the home run our first basement hit to win a playoff game. I was on third base. I can remember the headache I had that game that I was prone to when I was 11. And I can remember the first time I’d had a mature/adult attachment to music that way. I can’t see or feel or hear it literally. But it’s there. And I’m not sure it’s data.
Someone left Pete Yorn’s Musicforthemorningafter CD in the wardroom of my ship when we left the Gulf on our way home after 9/11. I remember waking up one day and listening to it and stepping outside into the air on the bridge wing and it was cold. I hadn’t felt cold in 100 days. Cold. Pete Yorn. Wind. Homeward to a changed world. Not data.
I remember listening to Titus Andronicus’ More Perfect Union when my son was diagnosed. I did table jumps in the park in the middle of the night when I couldn’t sleep. I split open my leg and needed stitches. I was angry and hurt. Blood. Pain. Anger. Patrick Stickle’s Guitar. My son’s face. The agony of watching him lose his speech. Not data.
I don’t know how to overlay any of that into data paths. I know we’ll eventually create code that will be able to mimic nearly every human input. But not feeling. And I don’t see “feeling” as the residue that’s left behind by conditioned data responses in our heads. Feeling is the point. And it’s hard to separate that which we do from that which we feel.
There’s a nonzero chance I’m wrong about this. Few thought AI would replace painters and composers before it replaced truck drivers. But of course it could. Because the fine motor or auditory skill of art is the least human part. And the ability to project forth patterns based on compiling data and completing the next loop is not hard for contemporary computer power. But the feeling that creates it is the art. Art is that which transcends the barrier of our inner expression into the outside world. And if the inner expression is just math and data pathways; a cosmic prediction model, than there is not art. Art > data.
It wasn’t the data that Roy Batty feared he would lose.