Consciousness is experience
Christof Koch
The Feeling Of Life Itself
Today I asked AI to create an image of peace, using the words ‘bright reflective colours, peace.’ I’m interested in what artificial intelligence can contribute to our conscious human capacity for creativity, experience and reflection.
Now I shall spend a few days considering the (I think beautiful) image I’ve been presented with. What can I see of peace here? I wonder, too, what you might see? Will several responses differ widely, or will we each see similar attributes of peace?
First response in me sees multi-layered, multi-coloured richness, depth and diversity with an immediately obvious lack of sharp edges. No grazed knees or broken bones here. I recall something similar from my childhood imaginings about ‘Heaven.’
What would a more fluid human consciousness look like? How would our experience of life change? Is the sharp-edged, the hard and fast, the ‘absolute,’ helpful? I see inviting pathways in this image – cohesion, unity in diversity, no walls, no weapons – and I feel something of peace.
We’re all too familiar with the experience of what it feels like when we encounter deliberate fomenting of anger, anxiety, lack, loss, and warfare in its various tragic guises. I dare to hope that our humankind may become more familiar with the sort of intelligence – ‘artificial’ and ‘human’ – that presents, holds out to us all, new visions of peace.
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