What if consciousness ..

.. is a myth

I could actually end this article with its title and its subtitle, and it would say it all but let me elaborate more.

Maybe you have read one of Yuval Harari’s books: “A Short History of Humanity”, “Homo Deus”, “21 Lessons for the 21^st Century” or his recent book “Nexus”. If not, I would recommend you to do so. But if you did, I guess that you have noticed that there is one recurring concept in this writing: The concept of the myth.

He postulates that many things that people in different places and cultures regard as a “given objective reality” are actually “intersubjective realities” that are created through ideas (and mental models) that we tell each other. Through word, ritual, writing, electronic media, and recently the internet, some ideas get such momentum that they grow from being an idea to being “a real thing in our minds”. Ideas that seem real and important enough for people to hate each other, kill each other, go to war with each other, and commit unspeakable atrocities.

Hariri labels such ideas “myths”. To be more precise, according to my understanding he would label anything that is created as an “intersubjective reality” between a number of people as a myth; maybe even a simple tale, that a parent invents to tell his kids as good night story, or a vision that is perpetuated by a founder to convince his customers, his team and his investors to move forward. But for the sake of this post, I will consider only a small subset of all myths, namely those of significant anthropological relevance.

Which are those myths? This is a highly debatable and emotional topic. For example, a deeply religious person would never consider God to be “a myth” but as a real existing entity. Another topic that deeply divides opinions would be about climate change and its immediate dangers. The list is long and it is not the purpose to discuss it in depth here.

Rather, the purpose is to ask the question of whether our subjective “consciousness” is rather a “myth” than a given objective fact.

In my mental considerations, I follow to some extent a similar trail of thought as happened to the idea of the soul. Atheists and “empirical rationalists”, or maybe let’s better say “empirical extremists” – people who categorically discard any belief that cannot be tested by the means of physical measurement instruments, concluded that the soul does not exist as an objective entity. Now, again it’s not the question here to discuss if this worldview is the correct one, but just to state, that through the empirical methods that were available to us until now, we could not find anything that would provide empirical evidence for such a thing as “the soul” in the common spiritual sense (if something like this = “a common spiritual sense” even exists, given plenitude of different spiritual believes).

Maybe, I am plain wrong here but what empirical evidence did we find for consciousness?

Our main evidence comes from our own perception. We have a perception of ourselves and while awake, we process information from our sensory inputs in forms of feelings and a mental scratchpad. Some people do it faster, some people do it slower. Each individual claims to have this experience and it represents a form of “highest” (or indeed “the only”) reality for us.

For beings that are similar enough to us, we assume that their perception and mental process work very similarly to our own and we reserve them the same mental status of “consciousness”. You might recognize that throughout history the definition of “similar enough” varied by a lot. During the Rwanda Civil War, this status would not be granted by the Hutus to the Tutsi and vice versa. During the Second World War, the Japanese occupants would not grant this status to the Chinese. During the colonialization of the Americas and Africa, this status would not be granted to native people by the intruders. This list could go on for long.

Typically, we test these assumptions by asking subjects particular sets of questions from which we deduct that the subject under test is “conscious” indeed. Advanced AI systems put us into a dilemma here: Suppose you run some test through an interface that does not allow you to know where you interact with a human or an AI system (e.g. the Turing test). By today, the results of such tests can lead to the outcome that the entity under test would have to be labeled “conscious” if you apply the same unbiased standards to it as were applied while testing humans.

However, instead of doing so, we tend to raise the bar for the “consciousness stamp” and invent more and more tests that might not actually test for consciousness (as we don’t have a clear cut definition of it anyway) but rather for “how similar the entity under test is to a human being”. This may not be so surprising after all, as consciousness seems to be one of the very last things that we use to justify our moral status. Previously, different peoples used many things, such as “descendants of God”, “beings with a soul”, “Aryan race”, “the chosen nation”, etc. to justify their moral status but not much of this is left anymore.

Thus, the question arises: Is consciousness really an objective reality that can be attributed to particular biological, e.g. carbon-based beings (and in the future maybe also to non-biological ones) or is it rather another human myth that allows us to claim moral status over basically all other living beings and AxI (as long as we are in control).

I am not sure but my gut feeling is that rather the latter than the former is true.