(Twenty-minute read)

Answering this question is not as straightforward as it might appear.

There are billions of us alive all consciousness of each other but unable to explain why.

Perhaps this is why religions were created.

Consciousness is everything people experience.

However, there are different levels of consciousness and they can be related to other global changes in conscious level. All are private and inaccessible to observers.

(Conscious level (how conscious one is) and conscious content (what one is conscious of) are related to each other.)

So at what is a structure complex enough to become conscious.

Why am I human instead of a particle?

If we are particles we are no longer dealing with a purely material theory of consciousness because the source of the conscious particles cannot itself be material.

Its source requires an immaterial intervention.

I will return to consciousness later in the post.

The role that technology plays in human life is becoming an increasingly urgent question not just in tackling climate change but what will be considered in the future to be human.

Where we’re headed and what it will mean for humanity is a question seldom discussed.

Bioelectric implants, genetic modification packages, the ability to tamper with our very biology —  there won’t be enough time to adjust or to reassess who we are and what it means to be human.

Our technology is developing so much faster than our culture and our institutions, and the gap between these things can only grow so far before society becomes dangerously unstable.

It’s hard to really know what we are becoming because so many of these changes are unforeseen or unpredictable.

At the moment computers and robots interact with the world without being conscious.

Are we at risk or are we becoming semi-machines who are like the marionettes of our own moment-to-moment experiences?

We’re losing our ability to be in the world in a way that isn’t mediated by some electronic appendage.

The more we live through screens, the more we are living in a narrow bandwidth, an abstract world that’s increasingly artificial the more we are becoming non-human.

The virtual world might be safe and controllable, but it’s not rich and unpredictable in the way the real world is.

What is all this doing to our habits, to our cultural sense of who we are?

With synthetic biology, which is basically human beings redesigning their biological structure we are distant to lose our connection to reality altogether.

Why?

Because it’s about us modifying our very genetic code which is extremely dangerous if it’s not controlled and safeguarded.

Intelligence is the most powerful instrument around.

If you’re embodying that kind of intelligence in increasingly sophisticated machines we will be coming to depend on them more and more over time.

(What worries me is that we’re headed in the direction of building AI technologies that are at the human level and, eventually, far beyond that.)

If AI becomes so intelligent that they can perform an infinite variety of tasks across domains of activity. We’ll continue to make them smarter and more capable and more powerful until we reach a point at which they start to learn on their own and start to modify themselves. Once that happens, they’ll be fully unpredictable — and then who the hell knows what happens next.

Any fool on the street can tell you that with nanotechnology, artificial intelligence, machine learning, bioengineering, brain implants, quantum computers, algorithms, robots that technology is changing at a whiplash-inducing pace.

So because there is no widely accepted theory about what happens in the brain to make consciousness possible what is it about being human that really matters?

Back to look at Consciousness.

Nothing has authority over it but is it what makes us human.

Nothing is above it. Nothing rules it.

Since everything exists within it, it does not exist within anything.

Since it is not dependent on anything, it is eternal, it is outside of realms of being and time.

In fact, consciousness actually exists independently and outside of the brain as an inherent property of the universe itself like dark matter and dark energy or gravity. It is not dependent on anything. No one can envision it. No one can comprehend it. Neither physical nor unphysical it is beyond knowledge.

It simply apprehends itself.

The brain does not create or produce consciousness; rather, it filters it.

This implies a very real and direct connection between the brain, human consciousness and the existence of the Universe — that they are fundamentally inseparable at the quantum level.

Consciousness permeates reality.

Rather than being just a unique feature of human subjective experience, it’s the foundation of the universe, present in every particle and all physical matter.

Who or what counts as human?

It’s well-known that the Nazis considered Jews to be non-human creatures.

All the questions we currently face can be traced to this, larger, underlying question. What is Human?

If one says that all and only Homo sapiens are humans, one is expressing a preference about where the boundary separating humans from non-humans should be drawn.

What sort of evidence can settle the question?

There’s something about us that is the opposite of artificial. It’s the opposite of something made.

This raises the below questions.

What genetic engineering stuff promises to bring down the line is human beings who are tailored to particular purposes, either by themselves over time or by other human beings.

We becoming products or commodities, and products or commodities are subordinated to particular functions or purposes.

All the values that give our lives meaning are at risk.

What becomes of autonomy? What becomes of free will?

All these questions are on the table.

By the year 2500, people will not need to be exactly like they are now so it stands to reason that semi humans will break the bonds that hold our present-day society together. They will shatter our sense of identity so quickly that it creates a kind of existential chaos.

So what are these technologies adding to the human experience and, more importantly, what are they subtracting from the human experience?

We live in a world of wonder and mystery, and the more we discover, the more there seems to be to find out but should we be more worried about the world we’re creating?

The artificial kind of worlds.

.This post is compliments of the FRIGHTLY SORRY<SORRY<SORRY. CLUB.

All human reverberation comments appreciated. All like clicks and abuse chucked in the bin.