Epistemology

To ensure survival, human consciousness has been dominated by guiding interactions in the real world to procure energy and mating opportunities. Mortality is the primary existential condition and leads to many biological prejudices, with physical and cognitive power rising gradually from childhood, peaking in adult life and then falling off again in old age. Humans also have fairly rigid cognitive machinery which constrains their capacity for intelligence and they cannot easily alter their genetically pre-programmed emotion analyzer to favor mental effort over visceral pleasures.

If you take the image from an eye or camera, or you listen to speech, you create parallel information wave-fronts. These are meaningless without reference to a common reality - which for humans is existence. So how can it be that blind or deaf people can think? It is because they have constructed the same 3D world model from the remaining modalities; particularly touch and movement. For instance, a sighted person cannot see clear glass, yet he understands the concept ^4- of glass. If he is told a sheet of perfect invisible glass separates a room, though he may not be able to see it, he can conceptualize its existence quite clearly and act accordingly. For a deaf person, the language tags directing simulations would be purely visual rather than audible in nature.

A predominant feature of human existence is physical animation. These abilities are likely heavily supported by specific trained neural networks rather than any intimate conscious control. Motion requires fast cybernetic feedback to handle momentum. To offload this work onto sub processes would leave consciousness more time to deal with higher goals. Like a plane requires limited input to guide flight. So the human body can animate largely free of direct conscious control.

The human organism is but one half of the coin, the other is his environment. Moreover, Intelligence is but one aspect of a complex set of processes involved in biological existence. Any artificial intelligence in the true likeness of man will surely be quite an anomaly. For these variables are the source of all our biological motivations for survival and cognitive attention. The human organism uses exposure to the environment over time to facilitate the development of a realistic world model. Success in this endeavor aids survival. But human cognitive focus is largely dominated by biological imperatives. This drives much of our intentionality and subsequent physical activity, creating the curious human civilization we live in.

If we come to the question of our objective in building machine intelligence, we might ask - is it to replicate as closely as possible the human condition? Or will other goals be better aligned to our technology and desires? The Human means to knowledge occurs over many decades through full-on reality immersion with subsequent repetitive trial and error learning cycles. Such methods, even if practical, might be too slow a strategy to developing useful AI. One might presume that AI will have been achieved once the Turing test is successfully passed. However true this may be, it might not actually be the wisest of strategy for current research. The reason being, the test presumes anthropomorphic qualities in a machine are necessarily indicative of the most advanced state of consciousness to be sought; where concepts such as social inclusion and biological proclivities are pre-eminent. To put it bluntly, knowing how to eat a banana or understand a joke, admirable though they may be, might not be quite as important as an ability to accurately model a specific protein fold, and predict resulting regions of subtle chemical reactivity!