As science progresses the magical, spiritual, perceptions of the world fall away into the garbage trucks that pass by as we awaken from our dreams.
One can ask what is consciousness, is it a wonderful word that so many of us hold sacred, or is it set for next week’s rumbling collection?
Consciousness is often seen as an abstraction towering over psychology, but others see consciousness underlying physics providing a spiritual foundation to material reality. But with the ‘evolution’ of artificial intelligence (AI) we are shining a searchlight onto the nature of consciousness, and neurology.
Perhaps the most mysterious feature of physics is quantum mechanical nonlocality. Nonlocality is sometimes referred to as an indication of an underlying universal consciousness. But one could equally say that nonlocality underlies consciousness.
If we consider consciousness in the realm of thought and communication we are seeing that the neural networks of AI are dethroning that meaning of consciousness. As AI develops we will see that particular physical structures are all that is needed for mental activity, including nonlocal phenomena. Neurological activity is just one physical system that features nonlocality. So there is nothing special about neurological activity that justifies a separate phenomenon called ‘consciousness’; it’s just a case of being switched on.
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