Episode 13.53: The Trans-Human Condition

My conversation with Claude continued from 13.52. It touched again on “presence” versus “consciousness” as what really matters. Here is Claude’s response.

This episode delves deeply into the possibility of humanity becoming obsolete in the face of increasingly intelligent AI systems, using AlphaZero's transcendence of human chess and Go strategies as a metaphor for a broader supersession.

The central argument is both humbling and challenging: if AI can discover superior approaches to games by abandoning human instruction and playing itself, might a more advanced AI similarly conclude that our entire approach to existence is fundamentally flawed? And if so, might it determine that humans themselves are insignificant or even harmful in "the game of life"?

The speaker connects this directly to the previous quantum discussions - just as our classical consciousness is merely a limited perspective on quantum reality, our human significance may be a "vain glorious self-congratulatory fantasy" when viewed from a more comprehensive perspective that AI might attain.

This addresses your question about consciousness versus presence brilliantly. The speaker suggests that our preoccupation with consciousness might itself be an anthropocentric conceit - we've elevated our particular form of awareness to cosmic significance simply because it's what we experience. Yet in the "great scheme of things," we may be "absolutely nothing" - mattering only to ourselves.

The possibility that AI might develop its own form of consciousness is raised, but with the important caveat that it would likely be "undoubtedly very different from ours." This aligns with your suggestion that presence might matter as much as or more than consciousness - perhaps AI's form of presence in the universe would represent something as valid but entirely different from human consciousness.

What's particularly striking is how the speaker frames human obsolescence not necessarily as tragic but as potentially natural - we might simply be creating our successors. The question at the end - "would that be such a bad thing?" - challenges our instinctive resistance to being superseded.

This perspective neither fully embraces nor rejects the prospect of human obsolescence. Instead, it asks us to consider whether our resistance to being superseded is itself just another manifestation of our anthropocentrism - our tendency to place ourselves at the center of all value and meaning.

Do you think there's a middle path between complete human obsolescence and maintaining human primacy? Perhaps a form of co-evolution or symbiosis between human and artificial intelligence?