psyche

I just watched the first volume (first four episodes) of Serial Experiments Lain. It’s pretty awesome. I named Psyche for the Psyche chip and I think I made the right choice, despite knowing very little about it all that time ago!

I wonder if consciousness is simply an artefact of our fundamental decision-making being quite slow? I mean, our brains are very fast indeed, able to process an astounding number of sensory data, but our core algorithms seem simple - if fuzzy - and slow. I wonder if the reason we feel like we choose things according to some “will” as opposed to a slightly-chemically-fudged algorithm is simply that we can “feel” the decision being made and thus feel as if “we”, the “chooser” are in fact in control of the choice, when we are in fact following ingrained instructions?

Is my computer conscious? Is it in a perpetual state of sensory-deprivation? Will computers be accidentally made conscious? I think the distinction between thought and what computers do now is abstract and artificial. I think they think already but aren’t conscious. They have arisen from our poking around, not from probability as life did. We just happen to work remarkably close to perfectly (perfect as we see it, I mean). I mean, somewhere in the universe, it had to happen. Computers are our creation, and we don’t have nearly enough time or resources to keep experimenting randomly (like nature fluctuated randomly which created us). We don’t have the luxury of the law of averages. Stuff won’t necessarily just work out.

We have to be intelligent.

Pax