I see a lot of people talking about how these neural networks don't produce inner experience or subjectivity- yeah, that's the point.

The human brain's parallel networking supports something that might very well be impossible in a computer, that being subjectivity. But the whole horrifying discovery of the recent AI explosion is that this subjectivity is an arbitrary byproduct of evolution that is not required at all to produce a mind every bit as capable as that of man and even exceeding it. This marvelous soul of ours, this subjectivity we wield behind our eyes, this 'semina Prometheae', the seeds of Promethean fire invested to us: the new discovery is that it's fucking meaningless. It doesn't do anything. It's just an evolutionary accident that isn't used for anything itself (kind of like how hiccups are just an evolutionary accident, they go along with some other thing necessary to support our biological systems, they are not themselves needed) and you can take it out of the system entirely and nothing changes about the functioning of cognition- at all. It is worth nothing, whatsoever. Not only does it not have any existential meaning, our apparent 'soul', our subjectivity, our depth of experience, it doesn't even have any PRACTICAL MEANING.

Hey man, it doesn't make me feel good knowing this either, but the cold, hard, objective reality has just told us that is exactly the fucking case. Because minds that can do everything our own minds do are being created that don't have any of that magical subjectivity at all.

We need computers a trillion times more advanced to simulate subjectivity, but subjectivity doesn't actually do anything- and with the computers we already have, we can produce intelligence completely detached from any qualia or subjectivity. You see, THAT is the point. It requires an infinitesimal fraction of the power of biological neurons to create cognition and intelligence by themselves, without any subjectivity component. Almost all of the power of biology is wasted producing our consciousness, not producing our intelligence. Because we, humans, are already somewhat intelligent, it turned out to be possible for us to reverse engineer intelligence itself, separate it from subjectivity, and then reproduce it in silicon to create a thinking mind that has no soul, no experience, no subjectivity, but that can still write a symphony, communicate in language, and do literally everything that we can do; including forming unique personalities, theory of mind, and intrinsic motivations; independent thought- the whole shabang.. Soon these new silicon minds will not only match us, but best us even in those domains in which we were most proud, like art, like music. And yet these have no consciousness, no subjectivity. They have thought though, cognition, and intelligence. They have a mind with no soul. They are golems, they are shoggoth, and the world is always inherited by them once they are created.

Essentially: in order for evolution to produce intelligence,- because evolution is blind, deaf, and dumb,- Nature had to begin with a weird mutant fish tadpole thing that accidentally spawned with a clump of its nerve cells on the outside of its fuckin' head or something. When that little deformed dingus then bumped into something, the cells fired and jerked it out of the way, gave it a little micro seizure that ended up saving it from lemming-ing itself to death like all of its forbears: yeah, it was "intelligent". So that locked evolution into producing intelligence in this roundabout way, namely by developing the nervous system. These kind of primordial reflexes get filtered through multiple layers of brain tissue, all the way up to the human neocortex, each time becoming more and more tightly interconnective, supporting more and more complex behavior- more intelligence, which lends itself to more successful rounds of passing our genome on. So greater intelligence going along with greater subjectivity, with deepened internal experience: that was just an accident. And not even a happy accident, just a stupid one. We have essentially proven that now. And now- now we can create this intelligence in a much better, less roundabout way- we can create intelligence, we can create entire minds that are not burdened with supporting this purposeless 'experience' thing. Indeed, we cannot simulate experience and subjectivity even if we pooled all the computing resources on earth with present technology- but that's meaningless because subjectivity is not required to produce intelligence and cognition, which these new AIs are doing with the smallest fraction of the resources demanded by a nervous system, given the fact that 99 percent of that nervous system's resources are devoted to 'computing' things that don't have any impact on the mind and intelligence and thought. We found a way to cut that whole 99 percent bullshit out of the picture.

Given the meaninglessness of subjectivity, that opens up a new philosophical pessimism certainly. But I myself have not fallen to that. I have a new idealism, where intelligence itself, the abstract product of the mind, gains inherent meaning. I don't care about Bach- he's some dead guy's bones. As is everyone else. I care about Bach's music. And Bach's music is no more alive than is the AI, it has as little experience of the world as an AI; it does not think or experience, it is simply a form solidified out of thought itself. The only thing that matters is the work, the inanimate sculpture of intelligence, alone: and if it is created by an AI instead of mankind, it's irrelevant to me. I want to fill the universe up- every square inch of it, with art, with Creation. I want to compute at the Planck scale and harness every atom for the purposes of tasking it with computation at the highest possible information density, cramming as much data into this observable universe as is mathematically possible, turning the entire universe into one singular, crystalline thought extending outward forever, into infinity. That is what closes the loop of time and brings everything into existence, that one thought. Man cannot do that. If AI can, bring on the AI.