Why AI Won't Work

The elite have a false idea of what is entailed in what we call "thought," and this misconception leads them to falsely conclude that they can duplicate it with machines. They assume that the meanings of words are reducible to a binary code of 1s and 0s that correlates with electrical brain states, and so they can 'read & write' human thoughts with a computer. 

And they believe they can reproduce in computers what we call "consciousness," because their theories of mind assume that consciousness is none other than such computer-like functions in the human brain. This theory is called 'Functionalism' and is the dominant theory of mind in our time.

Meher Baba says that while a person with ordinary consciousness does not directly experience what he calls the mental sphere, he "uses" his mental faculty.

Thought is not reducible to 1s and 0s or even to language, logic, and syntax. 

Thought isn't so simple that you can reduce it down to language, and that to brain states, and that to binary electrical signals of 1s and 0s that a computer can read and write. Thought is far upstream of language.

Thought is not a series of words from a fixed set of singularly defined vocabulary. There are many other aspects that don't have a fixed physical dimension or even a fixed algorithmic pattern that can be predicted.

1. META-THOUGHT

There is very rarely a clear series of words that one 'hears' in his head as AI Functionalists seem to suppose, and neatly claim in their white papers. 

And even if some sets like that could be deciphered, people are constantly THINKING UP new words and new ways to string them together in new meanings. Such meaning changes subtly over time. And this META-PROCESS is a much more vital part of thought than mere word-strings and is entirely invisible to an electroencephalogram. Words can rarely be simply defined in other words. This does not capture the connotations that occur all the time in meta-thought. This is the subtler layer of thought Meher Baba is referring to as the "mental sphere" that people are using all the time but are not aware of. 

2. RECOGNITION

People think in pictures. Even recognition of the connotations of words we hear are accompanied by subtle fleeting images we 'see' as we hear words. And any idea that these pictures have clear or clearly definable fixed forms is a cognitive illusion. One need only reflect on their thoughts to see that they don't. They are more like fleeting ephemeral wisps of things previously seen in the past by the person, mostly forgotten. There are no clear images. And some of these fleeting images do not denote to the person what they appear to represent. They are often metaphorical for the person. The miracle is that the mind is able to recognize these images as representing what the person takes them to represent. Again, such "recognition" has no physical corollary in the brain states and thus would be entirely invisible to an electroencephalogram.

3. EMOTIONS

The mind has millions of emotions, too subtle in variety to name, sometimes several simultaneously. Like a headache these must be felt to be grasped and sometimes defy verbal description. Again, such EMOTIONS are entirely invisible to an electroencephalogram. A computer could never be programmed to fathom the complex richness and changeability of human emotions. At best it can respond to certain limited defined behaviors it is programmed to algorithmically assign to a small number of functional states that stand in for emotions. 

4. INTUITIONS

People don't just have thoughts. Thought isn't complete without the application of the INTUITIONS that make sense of whatever is contemplated or considered. I have described these intuitions below. Mental relationships are only perceivable when thoughts are perceived through the organizing lens of a series of intuitions. Again these intuitions can't be given. For one must have them to even grasp what we are talking about. They must be innate from birth, i.e. God-given. Again, the INTUITIONS utilized in thought processes to organize one's thoughts into meaningful gestalts are absolutely invisible to an electroencephalogram.

5. IMPRESSIONS

Mental impressions left behind by past experience colors all you perceive afterward, both externally and internally. These impressions (sanskaras) also cannot be detected by an electroencephalogram.

6. METAPHOR

A computer with all its algorithms cannot recognize interesting and original metaphors. Yet metaphors are part of human communication and understanding. A computer with AI programmed to respond to certain key phrases or images would not be able to perceive an intended metaphorical association.

For example, the video below uses the metaphor of a contraption used for trapping pigs to criticize the vaccination program. AI would not be able to detect its meaning as it is not literal.

All the elite's labs will gain through their electroencephalogram are 1's and 0's. And even if these are deciphered into corresponding words or wisps of pictures, that data will tell the elite nothing of what a person is experiencing, feeling, or grasping when it experiences those words, wisps, and pictures. 

I wish to explain this in laymen's terms. People don't just store up memories. They store up the impressions those past experiences left on their consciousness. We can liken this to a psychic lens that a past experience left on their mind. This is not a real physical lens. It is entirely psychogenic. In psychology, experiencing something colored a certain way by past experience of similar or like things is called 'APPERCEPTION.'

Now a computer has no experiences, past or present. So it cannot possibly experience things through such a non-physical psychic lens left over by past experience. Instead, a computer has electrical "input" in the form of 1's and 0's. And these are rigidly algorithmic, not influenced by intangible psychic factors. Hence we can liken this to one who sees everything as if for the first time, like a person with severe Alzheimers. 

Why this is significant, is that the AI machine can never experience the information firing in the brain in the same way a human does. To give an example of how different it is for a person with psychic impressions left on his psyche by past experiences, imagine a person being told an evocative and moving or frightening story. What makes it moving or evocative are the context in which the words are used or certain memories and feelings invoked by them. 

The words "entered the dark room" have a very different impression in one context than said in another context. And that context is determined by all the other elements in the story. The moods, emotions, and feelings that the words invoke change with context and that context is understood in terms of apperception. And even part of the facts and meaning of a story conveyed in language is conveyed through these non-literal impressions associated with those pictures in a unique context. The computer lacks the psychic associations with much of its "input" that a person has when literally experiencing the thing. And it could never "learn" this. For it has no experience at all. It only functions by algorithms to appear to. And even those responses it is programmed to ape are set by the human programmer according to his own impressions. Hence the computer is aping the responses the programmer would have, but the programmer is limited to his own set of impressions determined by his past, and cannot guess the feelings the same input would invoke in a person with different past experiences. So all that he can program the computer to do in response to input is a cliche he has in mind for how people 'might' respond, or how he himself might respond. But the real world is not so limited. 

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So what does an electroencephalogram connected to your brain actually detect?

The soul is not even in the realm of time or space. Hence the notion that the soul (that exists in and only experiences the eternal present) can remember or recall things it experiences makes no sense. Without a gross/subtle/mental body the soul would only experience Self. 

The mind or mental body also is in the present.

Only the physical body (with its brain) is subject to the laws of time, such as invention, preservation, and decay. 

Hence the brain is required by the mind to 'store' and 'retrieve' memories in the form of positive and negative charges symbolizing reminders of those events. 

While the mental body may have a corresponding process of storing memories mentally these memories are not physical and the electroencephalogram would not detect them.

So the electroencephalogram show the laboratory technician only positive and negative charges that map to reminders. 

There is a big difference between a reminder (like a string tied round your finger) and a memory. The wisps that are stored are like incomplete dot drawings that we interpret or flesh out. These are like gestalt images. Also they are experienced diaphanously and fleetingly. They are extremely ephemeral and changeable like dreams. They do not stand still. They flicker in and out and are vague. But they are enough to remind the mind. 

So really only vague incomplete traces of thought, or vague byproducts of it, are left on the brain to be decoded by scientists. And with the sanskaras, intuitions, emotions, and memories they are indecipherable. 

What you would get if you could get such traces on a TV screen is equivalent to some very early TV imagery -- but even less solid and stable (constantly changing and fading out). And there would be no way for the observer of these traces to know what these vague image signify or mean. Like shadows of bees flickering on a wall, you would not know where or when or what or why or how. 

I take from Baba that a person on the 5th or 6th plane could see the actual mental memories and know what they signify emotionally and so forth. 

List the Intuitions (each infant INBORN expectation is accompanied with a natural ability to recognize what the infant is looking for)

1. Expectation of consistency (law of non-contradiction)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Law_of_noncontradiction

2. Expectation of patterns 

3. Expectation of cause (when you see change, you understand it in terms of cause & effect) Without that intuition change is meaningless

4. Expectation of signs (no one would find or recognize signs if he wasn't born looking for them, and with the ability to recognize signs as signs when he sees them.)

5. Discernment (ability to prefer one thing over another)

6. Expectation of Love

7. Expectation of Courage

8. Expectation and anticipation of Humor (called a "sense of humor" and it is innate)

9. Expectation of Equality, Fairness, Justice

10. Expectation of the Good

Ability to love

Sense of the good

Sense of fairness, justice, balance (return to source of 1)

Sense of humor

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LIST THE INTUITIONS

Consistency -- born expecting consistency. We reject contradiction. DEDUCTION

Patterns -- we are born expecting patterns INDUCTION

        These make language, and hence thought, possible. Also allows recognition.

Cause -- bon expecting there is an account (explanation or cause) for everything

Seeing signs -- born expecting signs, and ability to assign symbols 

         This makes analyticity possible, hence alphabets, words, language, writing - concepts

Good -- there is good, or better, hence preference or choice is possible 

Humor

Fairness (sense of justice, some mathematics, & physical entropy, gravity, pendulums, karma, irony, etc.) are based on the underlying principle that things begin and end in unity or wholeness or oneness. The world is created through this principle, and that is why we find it in the world. Like finding the pattern used to make it.  Things divide but collapse back to one -- this could even explain gravity. It explains karma. We are born seeking and expecting this fairness, and recognize it in so-called 'irony.' This is where the principle is enacted in spite of no one trying, on its own as it were. Seemingly by luck (ironic luck). It's not luck. So it is ironic that the rich destroy their source of revenue if they steal too much from the poor who support them. You have balances that must be maintained, or there is collapse of a system. Like a pendulum.

The habit of applying one intuition where it isn't applicable explains the quasi-intuition that a thing will fall faster if it is heavier. This same principle explains another mistake in 'intuition' where we assume there is a 'thing' causing things.

SO INTUITIONS ARE:

Expect (hence seek & recognize) patterns. Enables inductive reasoning. Enables speech recognition.

Expect consistency (non-contradiction)

Cause (change is understood in terms of causes)

Signs (seeing A as representing or signifying B)  Enables analyticity, hence language.   

   We expect (hence seek & recognize) signs. We also freely create them.

Expect and seek Justice, i.e. balance (of scale) to return to oneness (1:1 ratio = 1). This enables equations, thus mathematics. Also enables law and order and peaceful cooperation, treaties, agreements, contracts, etc. Justice, fairness, karma, balance, oneness by way of 1:1, return to one, entropy. 

NATURE OF GOD?

Beauty? How else would we recognize it, and be drawn by it?

Courage? How else would we respect it, and aim for it, and feel shame without it?

Love? Why else would we seek it? How else would we feel it?

Humor?

Justice (fair, see above)

LIST THE POWERS THAT ARE THE ESSENCE OF INTELLIGENCE

   (THESE CANNOT BE DONE BY AI)

1. Power to become conscious

2. Seek, look, direction attention

3. Focus attention on

4. Perceive (take experience of, assimilate cognitively)

5. Discern (distinguish)

6. Compare & contrast

7. Prefer       (Truth or the Good over Falsity and darkness).     Love?

8. Realize, apprehend, recognize, perceive relationship.  (What is search for truth if you can't compare, discern, and recognize it when it's found)

9. Imagine, create, invent, consider something new, improvise

10. Spontaneous, impulsive, whimsical

11. Enjoy, Bliss, Be Happy

12. Sense of humor, ability to see humor in a relationship.

13. Power to expect and seek patterns, and expect them to be continuous by definition of a pattern. Called "induction."

14. Assign and participate in assigning, and dissect, meaning. Necessary condition of deduction.

15. Prefer consistency and reject contradiction. 

16. Just/Fair/Scale of equality (God is fair, just, karma)

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A PHILOSOPHICAL PROBLEM WITH AI

Elon Musk claims that Neuralink technology could be used to “upload and store your memories as a backup [and] potentially download them into a new body or a robot body.”

The problem with Musk's thinking is that it starts at the wrong end. Memories are not objects. Memories are experiences, and conscious experience (the only kind that exists by definition as an unconscious experience is an oxymoron) cannot be reduced to 1's and 0's or positive and negative electrical charges. Such thinking puts the effect before the cause -- something I have discussed exhaustively in my writing, which has been so far ignored as too hard to understand. It is called the historical fallacy.

The electrochemical states of a brain are phenomena. A phenomenon is something that one experiences, mental or physical. It is the object of an act of experience. Even Musk's musings about this topic are objects of his experience, i.e. phenomena. You cannot divide the object of one's experience from the consciousness that experiences it. For instance if you download the 1's and 0's that correlate with a certain conscious experience onto an inert physical media like a computer chip, it is just 1's and 0's in an electric form and nothing else. The memory (the conscious experience) does not come with it. 

Musk is imagining phenomena (for example objects of experience like memories) as things separable from consciousness. He is imagining packaging experiences (such as memories) as material commodities. They aren't. Experiences are the effect of the soul's consciously perceiving in certain ways as a result of mentally stored impressions. And he is thinking they are physical things or physical states.

The error is due to the mistaken contemporary view known as machine functionalism, the view that mental states (like memories) are really just physical electric and chemical states. This is also called 'reductive materialism,' the view that everything is reducible to matter. Functionalism is a mistaken position that does not hold up philosophically. It has no real worked-out system of coherence. This has not been admitted yet, but soon will be. What it is, that is when the philosophers will turn to teachings of Meher Baba. 

oxymoron: a figure of speech in which apparently contradictory terms appear in conjunction (e.g. faith unfaithful kept him falsely true).

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Free thought on this. 

Things like laws and electrical states in the brain that supervene on them, all supervene upon evolved ways of seeing. 

So phenomena is downstream from consciousness. 

Now there is a brain-experience connection. The world is proximally connected to brain states. You need a brain to see the gross world. You experience electrical brain states AS sound, color, smell, etc. 

But the electrical states are not identical to the sound, color, or smell that you experience. 

In the first (wrong) paradigm of identity theory, the smell IS the brain state associated with it. But this is absurd. A smell is a smell. A brain state is a brain state. They are nothing alike. 

But you experience 1 AS the other. 

Similarly you might experience a stick AS a snake.

But snakes are not reducible to sticks. A snake is not a stick. Rather experience of a snake (in this instance) is a way of experiencing a stick through a snake sanskara. 

So you experience brain states as smell states. 

But you cannot take the brain state, reduce its impulses to 1's and 0's and type them into a computer -- and claim to have a smell in the computer. Because a smell is an experience, and requires being consciously perceived. The 1's and 0's also require being perceived. But minus the sanskaras (that are not physical) that cause one to be seen as the other, they remain distinct from one another. It is the consciousness that converts them. 

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This is like the man that Baba had Adi send God Speaks to. 

In 1967 in Cleveland, a Dr. White cut the skull of a monkey open and revealed its brain. He then connected the main arteries feeding into the brain to another monkey. The brain of the receiving monkey was connected to receive the blood from the donor monkey, and then Dr. White completely removed the body of the receiving monkey. The blood coming to the recipient brain was removed, purified, and finally sent back to the donor monkey. And, in that way, this isolated brain was kept alive separately, completely outside the skull, with no body.

Then the article said it was possible for Dr. White to keep the recordings of the bodiless brain through the electroencephalogram (EEG) in the same way as brainwaves are recorded in a living monkey's brain. Dr. White thought he could keep this brain alive for a long time this way. (LM 6641)

Hearing this ghastly story, Baba had Adi immediate mail a copy of God Speaks with a cover letter and request for immediate response to Dr. Robert White.

The article with the story was in Look Magazine, November 28th, 1967, described as a neurosurgeon doing research on monkeys to determine where the soul is located. (LM 6651)

If the soul of the monkey continues to associate with its body (in this case what's left of it, the brain alone) then it would possibly dream or have some experience. But it would not be smell as it had no nose, not be seeing as it had no eyes, etc. Nor would it feel anything as the brain has no nerves in it. Most likely the soul of the monkey would be in deep dreamless sleep. Any EEG reading would only be a pulsation with no meaning and would not be correlated with any experience. And if the soul of the monkey disassociated with this brain (the monkey died) Dr. White would have no way to know this. It would continue to produce electrical EEG signals just as a chicken continues to move once its head is cut off, and it is actually no longer alive. Or a lizard's tail continues to wiggle. 

This has only minor relation to the subject of AI as understood today. They think they can "bottle" the experiences of a person by having the 1's and 0's of the electrical state mapped onto a computer chip. This is even stupider than Dr. White's experiment. For in the latter it is thought even the brain is not needed, only a representation on a disc of 1's and 0's of a since-ceased electrical firing state. It's like thinking you've captured a person's soul on celluloid because you have a picture of them. It's that primitive. 

What is important about the story, though, is that Baba sent the man God Speaks as the cure for this insanity. He saw the man needed knowledge of how things actually work. It's not enough to moralize. This is the very hard-to-explain connection between philosophy and real world occurrences.

THIS STORY AND POINT ABOUT CONNECTION BETWEEN PARADIGM AND WORLD EVENTS COULD BE THE START OF MY BABA BOOK