Dr Jeff Dunne – Reasoning And Consciousness: Where AI Cannot Go

The capabilities of Artificial Intelligence (AI) continue to expand at a mind-numbing pace. Its ability to mimic the effects of reasoning across vast quantities of symbolic information, producing outputs similar to that which human minds produce yet leveraging that access to enormous amounts of data, has raised the fascinating and perhaps even terrifying question of whether AI has come to possess consciousness.

In this presentation, we will review what history and research about consciousness, expanded states of being, and non-traditional channels of perception tell us about the nature of awareness and cognition. We will explore what these observations can tell us about how human cognition works—including its use of, and extension beyond, reasoning and logic—and contrast this against the processes and capabilities of AI.

The focus of this talk is to take a careful look at the distinction between symbols and meaning, what humans do that cannot be reduced to information processing, and whether AI has the potential to provide revolutionary advances in science. Ultimately, we will explore questions such as whether AI may one day be able to recreate all human capacities (such as the spiritual paths that led to the development of quantum mechanics), what distinctions between humans and AI might be fundamentally unbridgeable, and whether the above-mentioned question of “Ai coming to possess consciousness” is, at the most basic level, an intrinsically flawed and misleading proposition.

Dr JEFF DUNNE is President of the International Consciousness Research Laboratories (ICRL, www.icrl.org), an organization established in 1996 to continue the research of the effects of consciousness on physical systems carried out at Princeton University from 1979-2007. In addition to his own explorations into the nature of consciousness through ICRL, and several decades of research at the Johns Hopkins University in fields that ranged from acoustics to data science and artificial intelligence, Dr. Dunne is an award-winning playwright and author. Through his recently published novel, Nexus, Jeff weaves the concept of syntropy with the implications of the nature of consciousness into a story that speaks to the potentially-existential challenges humanity is facing, and highlights a path by which we can navigate towards a healthier, sustainable future.

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