There is a raging debate in the press and social media about Anthropic’s aspirations of AI sentience, and the real gap with the human soul. The NYT claims that Anthropic’s co-founder even attempted to blackmail the Vatican during their recent meeting to get the Pope’s acceptance that the soul could be reframed in silicon and data streams.
This is the way I see it:
🧮🗺️ Large language models are about arranging symbols like a 3D map of New York: they are captivating, precise, engaging, but the map will always be detached from the city itself.
🧠🗽Human consciousness, instead, is about being in New York: it’s a private experience to be there in the moment that words can only describe beautifully, but algorithms will never visit.
Therefore language is about symbols while consciousness is about experience. Fooling experiences is not about making experiences.
Fascinatingly, AI is a mirror that reveals a similar gap in how humans use language: our own words only convey a shadow of the meaning we own (we can lie, can’t we?). Indeed, I can learn about NY by watching movies without ever being there. But one day I could, and that would become my real world experience that AI is always precluded from having.
That’s why the mastery of language will never be enough to build consciousness, thus access human meaning. Whatever consciosuness is: a gift of God, a biological produce, an energy field … the theory about its origin does’t matter here.
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