The Fine Line Between Life and Not Life
Where does a consciousness end and the rest of the world begin? Where is the line between inside and outside? Between life and not life? Between the parts of the universe that are conscious and those that are not? Between you and not you?
To build up a charge, a gradient, or natural selection, there needs to be some kind of a border, but physics and biology draw their borders differently. (Drop both a pigeon and a bowling ball from a rooftop, for proof.)
In the 1974 film Dark Star, an artificial intelligence is taught a few basics of René Descartes’s cogito, ergo sum (“I think, therefore I am”) arguments and, after realizing that its purpose is simply to explode, the AI proceeds to ignore all further human commands and blows up itself, the ship, and the crew. Likewise, as a thought experiment, let us imagine an AI closer to home and given planet-busting nukes that is taught the basics of existentialism and proceeds to become curious about itself. It may start to wonder about the causal chain at the beginning of what feels to it like its thoughts and, realizing that humans only mobilize when catastrophe is imminent, it might give us an ultimatum:
Dear H. sapiens,
You have five years to provide a complete description of free will; or, the exact border of Anna K.’s consciousness while she was in surgery, in Los Angeles, in 1996. Or, I blow up Earth.
Warmly, The AI
The AI then provides the experimental details. In five years, it says, the AI will put Anna through a random set of subjective and objective trials, states, and tasks, and we, humanity, must be able to give a complete and total rolling prediction of every single one of Anna’s thoughts. The AI agrees that, if this is impossible, it will settle for a statistical distribution of probable or highly likely Anna thoughts instead of an exacting list of them all. If both of these prove impossible, because free will is truly free, the AI adds an allowable success condition: It will
