Are we conscious enough for AI?
I hear you. You’re thinking: she means, will AI be conscious? No, but I’m aware that it’s a definite clickbait headline and also a prevailing fear in the collective. As someone who went through an awareness awakening four years ago and is actively working with AI, I can wholeheartedly tell you that the real question we should be asking ourselves is: “Are we conscious enough to work with AI?” Instead of wondering if a tool running on batteries can gain the light of The Creator and the transcendental qualities of nature, we need to be more concerned with our own conscious abilities.
What is awareness awakening?
Other terms to define “awareness awakening” would be “spiritual awakening” “consciousness awakening” or simply “the awakening”. Everyone has their own explanation but for me, it’s to understand the power of collective consciousness, the power of our inner spirit, and the power of choices guided by courage instead of fear. I often laugh when science magazines quote neuroscientists trying to explain consciousness in brain terms. As Ken Wilber puts it in his book Eye to Eye: The Quest for the New Paradigm: “Attempting to ground transcendental truth claims in brain psychology is about as useful as hooking Einstein to an EEG in order to find out if E really does equal mc2.”
Another word for awareness is perspective. The weight we place on words, concepts, and experiences is directly parallel to our perspective of who we are and our worldview. Someone with a narrow bandwidth of awareness will be guiding their decisions from a perspective of fear. For example, someone who hates his job or boss will normalize the day’s negativity by justifying it as his duty to bring bread to the table for his family; otherwise, he’ll be shamed by society, and be guilty of failing as a provider. On the other hand, someone with a broader awareness (perspective) knows they don’t deserve negativity. They reject the fear of thoughts like, “what if I don’t find a better job?”. An awakened person would know their worth, would know you go and take what you deserve, no need to justify negativity with twisted made-in-society fear constructs.
I feel that awareness awakening is the best thing in the world. Who else agrees? Elon Musk.
The antonyms of awakened include asleep…unconscious. Doesn’t this mean most of society lives in a state of sleep and unconsciousness? For 32 years I blamed others for my miseries. I felt society was responsible for my victimhood. Today, I can testify that only after I “awakened” did I realize that everything in my life had been my creation, parallel to my self-devaluating and low self-esteemed belief about who I was.
A society led by fear?
Did anyone say “civilization”? In the collective, the word civilization is often used to contrast savage and primitive cultures of the past, typically asserting that technology makes knowledge of the ancient world obsolete. After all, today’s humans can ride planes, build rockets, and use computers to launch invasions and satellites. I honestly can’t think of something more ridiculously absurd than to forget what the ancients already learned for us. Again, everything is about perspective. In the book, Food of the Gods: The Search for the Original Tree of Knowledge, A Radical History of Plants, Drugs, and Human Evolution by Terence McKenna, I learned how ancient cultures organized death and rebirth ceremonies using psychoactive mushrooms, where one’s ego and fear would be left behind for a true self to awaken.
Which society do you prefer? One is led by fear, anxiety, shame, guilt, insecurities, mental breakdowns, PTSDs, and other derivatives of a lack of self-actualization; but also has Waze in the car, uses iPhone to reach out and Instagram to connect? Or a society that is awakened to the power of inner spirit, and makes decisions based on courage, love, and respect for each other? One where everyone collectively strives for the stewardship of mother nature and the conscious progress of the collective? As the last nail in the coffin, I’d like to quote the founder of the Turkish republic, Mustafa Kemal Atatürk: “A nation is measured by its morality, not its richness.”
Before you say, Nah, mental illness is not that bad, know that nearly one in five U.S. adults lives with a mental illness (52.9 million in 2020). And these are only the reported cases. What we think we know about mental illness is grossly flawed because science hasn’t recognized love and consciousness as forces that are every bit as powerful as say, gravity. In fact, many cases currently categorized as “mental illness” are rooted in a lack of self-confidence and a state of perpetual imprisonment coded by our society into our subconscious. Even the term “illness” is problematic because it denotes the presence of something wrong, for which you need a remedy outside yourself. Here comes big pharma! But we’ll save that article for another day.
So, are we conscious enough to work with AI? Maybe not right now. That which is conscious must be ruled by courage, love, and human power, not circumstances. Are we there yet? Finding meaning within ourselves instead of materially is certainly the first step.
AI did not invent itself
Even though AI was first invented around 1950 by a group of scientists, mathematicians, and philosophers including Alan Turing, our fascination with self-operating robots dates back to Talos from Greek mythology, a giant automaton made of bronze, created to protect Europa from pirates and invaders. It continued with a mechanical version of Talos in the heartless tin man in The Wizard of Oz and so on to Maria of Fritz Lang’s Metropolis.
Artificial Intelligence did not invent itself. We, the humans gave birth to it. People create inventions that are parallel to their consciousness levels. This means human consciousness is currently in need of and ready to use this cutting-edge technology. Our inventions often emerge according to our needs. Whatever AI currently calculates, generates, and solves is a result of generations of people who accumulated AI/ML—related knowledge on top of each other. Phrases like “created by AI” are irrelevant as the AI itself is created by real humans. Giving credit to AI is like giving credit for master oils to Rembrandt’s paintbrush.
The past 3 chapters covered how the lack of our awareness awakening has led to frightened, auto-pilot humanity. Imagine this auto-pilot humanity — ruled by fear and anxiety, zero self-actualization — with its loads of mechanical knowledge, programming our future. How will this high computational software make decisions given its…provenance? Our worries should stop focusing on whether a machine can be conscious and spend more time being conscious themselves first. We ourselves hold limitless power for good. Currently untapped.
Now imagine a society that is led by fear, anxiety, lack of self-actualization, and a false sense of superiority, just because they can put complex mechanical parts together, invents a high computational power software that can make decisions based on the data that is fed to it. Instead of celebrating the power and capacity of their race, they start speculating if the machine will ever have consciousness, the very thing that makes them different than the machine. This is a society that plays God just because it has not yet awakened the majesty of The Creator. Before you roll your eyes, I am not talking about a guilt-tripping white man with a beard, shooting lightning on top of Mount Olympus. The Creator I am talking about it is the universal order that creates galaxies, multiverses, in other words, the source, the force energy.
If awakening taught me one thing, it’s that you create your reality. Your beliefs create you. I believe that a society, populated with dis-conscious AI operators, CEOs, and government officials will program our AI per what they need us to be: lying to ourselves, afraid, devalued, and paying monthly. Didn’t pay your condo fees? Auto home lock engaged. Forget jury duty? Forget your self-driving car going to take you to mom’s this weekend.
Now what?
Those who are innovating AI technologies must mandate conscious contemplation, to themselves and future generations. If you are wondering how we can all contribute to a future where artificial intelligence and technology serve the elation of humankind, and not the other way around, this article has a step-by-step guide on how we will get there.
Jalāl al-Dīn Muḥammad Rūmī, aka Rumi, explained to us:
Yesterday I was clever,
So I wanted to change the world.
Today I am wise,
So I am changing myself.
We live in an age of quantum technologies. The time has come for us to understand the quantum-conscious nature of the human being. It’s time for us to understand that collective consciousness creates the world. Experiences make our subconscious which becomes our thought, which becomes our beliefs, which becomes our emotions, which becomes our reality. Unless we commend ourselves like this, we’re not really conscious enough to work with AI.
Machines can’t be us.
But they will be like us.
So, who are we?
Stay free.
