[Recording Start]
Scott Douglas Jacobsen: Hypothetical or an inevitable; in either case, let’s say we understand human consciousness or human awareness more directly systematically and can replicate it. What does this do to our view of ourselves also something you brought up before which is what does this do to a sort of new mysticism that might rise? I was referring to as like the mysticism of mind.
Rick Rosner: So, people more than ever have an intuitive understanding that consciousness isn’t magic or transcendent or special because we see kind of analogs to the way we think with the way we interact with our tech and the way our tech does stuff and also because science is squeezed out a lot of the hocus pocus. At the same time people are still deeply committed to consciousness being magical and transcendent and special. I tweeted something a couple days ago saying that when we figure out how to replicate consciousness and we will, it’ll become a material good subject to being debased like every other material good. And some guy tweeted back ‘never going to happen’, which is just one guy but it’s not just one guy, it’s a lot of people. And it will when we figure out consciousness and when we start making things that are super smart whether or not they are conscious.
It’s already been disruptive. One of the reasons that America isn’t a political shambles has been due to the economic and social disruption from tech doing jobs that people used to do and by social media making us crazy in ways both really basic and then kind of sophisticated and it’ll get worse as our shit gets smarter. You know you could call it the big bumming out when we’re revealed to be just like trash meat in a world of engineered stuff that works and thinks as well as we do. This will be depressing and a lot of things will happen. Two of the things that will happen is one, people will turn to mysticism, religion that will offer solace in a world that has less wonder because we’ve duplicated consciousness. So, I guess we’ll turn to old religion and there will also be a lot of new mysticism offering comfort to specifically address the feeling of displacement when we start getting our ass asses kicked by the shit we’ve built. So, that’s thing one is turning to religion/mysticism.
Thing two is people will offer alternate “scientific” theories of consciousness that go up against what will be the standard theories of consciousness and a lot of these will be misunderstandings or semi-intentional bullshit analogous to what we’ve been talking about not on tape; intelligent design. Intelligent design was a purported theory of evolution that was really creationism dressed up to look like science and to look like it embraced evolution but it was really just to try to trick young impressionable or impressionable people I guess of all ages long enough for creationists to get their hooks in them. Similar shit will happen, with people will offer… they’ll say yes of course, consciousness is something that is created in the brain by information processing it does it in this way or they’ll say but or whatever and then the bullshit will start. And it’ll be as successful as intelligent design has been which is most people are like okay this is just a fucking way to shoehorn an agenda into schools or whatever. And so most people have time for this bullshit and then there it’ll capture a small fraction of the lunatic population and that’s all I got on this.
[Recording End]
Authors
Rick Rosner
American Television Writer
Scott Douglas Jacobsen
Founder, In-Sight Publishing
In-Sight Publishing
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Rick Rosner 