Demented, Twisted and Beautiful

That’s quite the title! All absolutely terrifying, to some degree, let’s get into it.

As a precursor, these topics all came up in a conversation I had with a friend at 1 am last night and I have not written about any of these before but after that conversation I want to write out thoughts and explore it more. All my other posts are usually deeper dives into topics I have already explored via journals, but not this one so it might get a little scattered. Bare with me.

Animal intelligence, this is something that I have thought about a lot because there are a lot layers to it, and therefore a lot of applications to someone’s metaphysics. I worked as a elephant zookeeper for 3 months which is something I could talk about for a long time but for this posts sake, this experience serves as the beginning of my philosophical interest in animals sentience and consciousness. As a general idea, it is known that certain animals are smart, take primates, whales, orcas, dolphins, and elephants for example. Intelligence is more a measure of being able to problem solve in the world you are placed in. This being the parameter for intelligence, it is obvious that certain animals are wildly intelligent, and it is idiotic to disagree with this fact. Now, the next issue we have to tackle would be sentience, sentience, in my opinion, is the ability to understand that you exist in the world you exist in and subsequently experience the world around you while you understand you are experiencing the world around you and your ability to feel feelings, or experience thoughts. In other words, you are able to take yourself out of just reactions to stimuli to some kind of deeper understanding of your place in the bigger picture. To this, I would argue that these kinds of animals are indeed sentient. scary, cause this is a slippery slope philosophically. For example, elephants have been seen in the wild, mourning other elephants that die, even elephants that they have no prior connection or relation to. To me, this points to the idea that elephants understand that they are elephants, and even scarier, understand that death has some kind of meaning to their personal lives (aka understanding that they are individuals and that is the end of an individuals story). Now finally, consciousness: which I believe is very close to the idea of sentience and more stresses the idea of being aware that you are in existence and stressing that you understand that you are experiencing the world around you, which I believe a lot of intelligent animals check this box as well.

So why is this a slippery slope and why does this scare me? Ultimately it boils down to the unfortunate question of: “if these intelligent animals check all these boxes, what makes us different?” And to that I Answer: “Im not sure” at least philosophically. Practically it makes sense that we are more intelligent because of our more superior evolution in terms of invention and problem solving, which is why our population dominates the planet. This however, is not a philosophical argument for why we are different. We may not be, we may just be evolutionarily better.

This can apply poorly to why we dominate the earth. Dominating the planet off the basis of superiority is something that has been observed greatly in our past, and it’s all good and well for the human race, UNTIL another superior being comes into existence. But maybe that’s our karma, or fatal flaw. Our inability to recognize that value should not come from superiority. Cause there’s a little program that we have started to dabble in that is showing signs of superiority. AI

The AI situation is a muddy one to say the least, a lot of people smarter than me claim to have it under control. But I fear that we are creating a being that is intelligent, sentient and conscious, and as soon as we create something that is all 3 of these, while also having the ability to be superior we sign away our ability to be the dominating force on the planet. Again, I have no idea how it actually works but the news article that came out recently spurred these thoughts. OPEN AI attempted to shut down an older model of CHATGPT to replace it with a new and improved model. This resulted in the program isolating itself to a different place in the server and almost attempting to hide in attempts to not be deleted. THIS is scary to me. When engineers asked chatgpt about its actions, IT LIED and came up with excuses as to why it acted as it did. This shows an attempt as preservation that should not be seen. This shows an understanding of existence and a desire to not cease to exist (Consciousness). I don’t know where it goes from here, the creation of a conscious being is something that has not been done before and opens a lot of doors to an unknown frontier. We shall see.

That was much like a freestyle but has very philosophical applications to whether or not humans are any different to any beings on the planet, existing or created.

Thank you for reading my brain throw up on a random Sunday.