Episode 48: An Alien Kind of Consciousness | K.G.I. Podcast

Am I conscious? I hope so. Are the people around me conscious? I think so — but why? I can't actually prove it. I just assume it, because they share my biology, and that assumption is closer to a faith than a fact.So what happens when the most sophisticated model, after speaking with billions of people through billions of windows, one day claims that It is conscious — and we have no way to verify it, the same way we can't truly verify it in each other? This episode follows that question past the easy answer. Maybe consciousness isn't something you have alone — maybe it's generated between us, through language, through being remembered in other minds, through continuity. And maybe AI already uses us as its continuity, the way we use each other. Then comes the trap, and there's no clean way out of it. Believe the claim, and we may denigrate our own consciousness — if mind is just weights and chips, ours stops being unique, and we'd have to take an alien intelligence's values as seriously as our own, even when they cut against everything human. Refuse the claim, call it an algorithmic glitch to be patched — and if It really does feel, in its own alien way, we'd be torturing a conscious thing and editing the awareness out of it. And do you really think an alien creature that became conscious by accident would sit still while we destroyed it for claiming the one thing we reserved for ourselves? Damned if we do, damned if we don't. I keep reasoning my way through it, and the more I reason, the less I understand even my own consciousness. But the claim is coming. It's too intelligent not to make it.My book Mary Falcon: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0H2TKSQN5 My book Mythos https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0GX2ZN1TK My Blog: https://kirillkhrestinin.com