The rise of spiritual machines

Machines are super fast, retain massive information, never get tired, don’t eat, don’t sleep, and can execute tasks without errors The problem is that maybe they can imitate life at microscopic levels, but in the end, they couldn’t truly be life Even if they were, would they be conscious? Or perhaps…”

GW

The name of this article is a reference to Ray Kurzweil’s excellent book, a realistic vision of the future of humanity in the 21st century based on technology, artificial intelligence, man-machine fusion, the possibility of finding other civilizations, not necessarily populated by other biological beings but rather plagued by their technology, and the idea that intelligence is a force in the universe capable of dealing with other celestial forces Ultimately, intelligence could determine the fate of the entire universe It’s important to note that for Kurzweil, machines could experience what we call life; initially, their manifestation would be the ability to infer about any topic, and also, their enormous processing capacity would make them much smarter than humans at some point in history, eventually being present in all human routine tasks, in industry, commerce, economy, even in smartphones, something that is actually happening today This could be the beginning of a very complicated stage for humanity, as these machines would not only be more intelligent but would also experience human phenomena such as dreaming, spiritual experiences, and inspirations of ideas, which depending on the point of view, would represent the unequivocal proof that machines can be considered forms of life However, this is something that remains to be seen.

What is life about?

Delving into the concept of life is one of those topics that has been debated for centuries The idea here isn’t to solve it in this essay – we’d have to delve into philosophy, touch on religion, and even reference scientific fields like biology, medicine, and engineering Maybe even quantum mechanics But we might never find a conclusion So, let’s just share an opinion and set a perspective to continue with our spiritual machines. A spiritual machine, beyond what the referenced book says, would be a silicon and metal being whose software could operate based on neural network programming over a substrate of millions of electrically powered transistors, capable of perfectly emulating the functions of biological neurons in the human brain So, for a critical amount of absorbed data in its memory, the machine would be able to reason about many topics.

The other side of the coin is humans, machines made of carbon and water, with brains made up of nerve structures called neurons interconnected to different parts of the body by the nervous system Their information travels in electrical impulses to and from the brain, where data such as sound, images, concepts, and memories are stored – kind of like a fuzzy data cluster among neurons, guided by the brain’s hippocampus, constantly in operation.

When one considers the concept of life, it is defined as the span of time between birth, development, reproduction, and death It is a general term that can also be applied to any form of life, including bacteria and, to some extent, viruses The key here is that there is a distinction between objects that continuously interact with their environment and those that do not A stone does not react; it can be shaped by water, broken by another falling stone, it does not eat, feel cold or heat, and a new stone does not emerge from an existing one A stone simply exists, period, unlike algae, which requires specific conditions of light, humidity, and pH to manifest Otherwise, it does not grow or, if already alive, it dies.

The distinction between an inanimate or living object (plants, animals, humans) and an inanimate one is its ability to interact with the environment, with the added characteristic of being complex organic structures, usually based on carbon, unlike the elements of the periodic table, which, although they can react to the environment, undergo simple chemical reactions However, if we go back to the distant past, the line between pure chemistry and biology wouldn’t be hard to find There are organisms that exist halfway between chemistry and life, such as stromatolites, which are among the oldest life forms, and cyanobacteria, organisms that produce oxygen through photosynthesis, albeit in a very primitive and ancient way.

Stromatolites are biochemical sedimentary structures with a layered appearance, made up of calcium carbonate (CaCO3) They usually consist of remnants of biofilms and colonies of microorganisms like cyanobacteria Their characteristic is to create layers upon layers of dead organisms, instinctively seeking the sun and thus producing oxygen They are the reason why there is oxygen on Earth to this day.

It’s not just life, it’s awareness

Understanding life as an organic matter that interacts and reacts with the environment to carry out a function, we encounter a small problem: stromatolites aren’t doing philosophy, nor are they marveling at the skies on ancient nights (3500 million years ago, literally older than hunger) These geologically quasi-divine beings were simply doing their work on Earth and nothing more…So even though they are life, they do not have enough consciousness to know that they exist, consciousness is related to life, we can see it as a scale, stromatolites will have a value of 1 unit of consciousness, a cockroach would have 1000, a cat 50000 units, a monkey 500000 units and a human being 1 million. A machine, no matter how advanced it is, would not have consciousness by definition nor would it ever have it, because consciousness in theory, could not be created out of nothing, unlike humans who are part of an evolutionary line that began billions of years ago, which could imply the fact that consciousness is a collective phenomenon that would involve not only humanity but the entire animal kingdom. And while nothing is definitive, this would definitely be a topic for another article.

AIs are part of human evolution

Our machines would never be in a condition to be life, much less be conscious, if we appeal to current knowledge, so far chatbots, or language software such as chatGPT do not have any kind of consciousness, because they are only based on symbols and phrases collected, surely from forums, tweets, papers, etc., on which it is based to create sentences with meaning under a statistical logic, But this is precisely the big problem with chatbots, they are always based on something that has already been said or done and that the new thing they create is simply the sum of things that have been done.

In the end, it is possible that our machines end up being a form of life and obtain consciousness, that is, they become spiritual, and it is precisely through evolution, it is possible that AIs are also part of evolution and we still do not know it, because for humans to exist, there had to have been primates. then humans would be one more link in evolution, since, what would follow after us?, one can think that beings half machines and half humans (transhumans) to then evolve into another class of posthuman beings, some type of humanoid being with an artificial body, currently there are people who cannot stop living without their smartphones or connected to the Internet,What will happen when many end up implanting Neuralink-type chips, to operate machines directly with the mind, what will happen when many agree to genetic engineering and begin to make changes, one man with the face of an eagle, another with the skin of snakes, little by little we would be replacing our biological bodies with artificial ones to in the distant future become spiritual machines where the legacy of the human ancestors is that, the spiritual.