Why AI Will Never Be Conscious

Using the standards applied to any other area of science, psychic functioning has been well established. —Dr. Jessica Utts, Professor Emerita at UC Irvine and former president of the American Statistical Association

Bullish predications of AI’s imminent emergence into full-blown consciousness invariably miss the forest for the trees. In this analogy, the view is from ground level and the trees that are visible from here obscure the much larger picture. These trees are information processing, at which AI already famously excels, but if we elevate our perspective and take a look at the entire forest from above, we can recognize that there’s a whole lot more to consciousness than information processing.

I’m not even talking about precious qualities of individuality that can never be captured by a machine or the irreducible mediation of flesh and blood. I’m talking instead about aspects of consciousness as such, independent of the body and the physical world itself, that have historically been neglected or outright dismissed but that are nevertheless stubbornly real and that transcend all possible automation.

My central argument is that the evidence amassed for the authenticity of psychic phenomena proves this independence of consciousness, and that to the extent that AI remains dependent for its very existence on a materialistic substate—computers—it can never successfully emulate the rich forest we inhabit.

Extrasensory Perception 1: Telepathy

This first category is scientifically far from the wooly-headed woo-woo that many comfortably presume. Extrasensory perception (ESP) in all its forms would not be possible if consciousness were limited to the inside of our skulls, locally produced by the brain; instead, it is a non-local information field to which gifted individuals can attune themselves.

In his book Entangled Minds, leading researcher Dean Radin reports that between 1974 and 2004, a total of eighty-eight rigorous experiments were performed following the following standard protocol. Picture a room that looks like a large walk-in freezer but warm and with a comfortable chair—a solid steel, double-walled chamber that shields fully against electromagnetic signals and acoustic noise. Now another room, fifty feet away within the same building and containing another chair and a computer screen. The sender(S) sits in front of her screen. The receiver(R) sits in the isolation chamber; all S has to work with are four picture cards showing, say, a horse, a pair of scissors, a mountain, and a car. Ten times during a thirty-minute sending session, S is shown a randomly selected image (one of the four) on the screen and attempts to mentally convey it to R. R is simultaneously instructed to envision the “target” image and then make his best guess. By pure chance, R should score a “hit” 25% of the time.

The meta-analysis of these eighty-eight studies found 1008 hits in 3145 trials for an overall success rate of 32%. This result may seem minor, but keep in mind that its extremely robust replicability over thirty years demonstrates nothing less than a genuine effect unexplainable by current science. Even a 26% outcome, sustained across so many trials, would have demonstrated the same, though less dramatically. Any clear-cut evidence of a fundamental consciousness field operating independent of bodily perception would of course establish its existence, even if its informational payload is imperfectly accessed. Radin points out that the 7%-above-chance hit rate represents an unlikelihood of 29,000,000,000,000,000,000 to 1; unlikelihood means “odds against mere chance.”

Understand also that these experiments were carried out using thousands of subjects, ordinary people who had shown no salient psychic gifts beforehand. Their striking success speaks, therefore, to a mental capacity widespread among the human population. Others possess it to a much higher degree, for example the young individuals exhibiting Savant Syndrome featured in The Telepathy Tapes podcast, who routinely achieve hit rates above 90%.

Extrasensory Perception 2: Remote Viewing

While telepathy has been demonstrated most robustly between individuals in the same vicinity, remote viewing has been shown to succeed irrespective of distance.

From 1972 until 1995, the CIA funded a remote viewing program out of Stanford University and Fort Meade in Maryland. The twenty-two million dollars invested and the longevity of this program testify to its success. Co-founded by Russell Targ, a physicist and pioneer in the development of the laser in the 1940s, the Stanford Research Institute recruited highly gifted psychics who then proved themselves again and again by acquiring targets, such as text written on a sheet of paper miles away, the location (on a map) of a buried object, or even Soviet secrets from across the world.

One celebrated example, declassified only years later and summarized by Annie Jacobson, is that of a new class of Soviet submarine. In 1979-1980, members of the National Security Council had been shown photographs taken by a KH-9 spy satellite that revealed a massive building at the Severodvinsk Naval Base in Russia. Located 650 miles north of Moscow near the Arctic Circle, this base was under high suspicion by the U.S. intelligence community because of a sudden uptick in activity at the site.

In Remote Viewing Session C54, a sealed envelope was placed on a table in front of SRI remote viewer Joe McMoneagle, their star practitioner. He was asked to provide information about the photo hidden inside. McMoneagle described a huge building “near some kind of shoreline, either a big lake or some bay. It smells like a gas plant,” he said, “like there’s smelting or melting going on inside the building.”

He mentioned lots of people in funny hats…arc welding…standing on catwalks. They’re cutting metal or bending metal, welding metal, shaping metal. Very, very large. There’s some kind of ship. Some kind of vessel. I’m getting a very strong impression of propellers. Jesus! This is really mind-blowing. I’m seeing fins, but they’re not rocket fins or airplane fins. They’re…they look like shark fins. I’m getting a strong impression of a huge, coffin-type container. It’s like they created part of a submarine to…to fasten this modification to. I think it’s like a prototype, perhaps four, five, or six stories tall. I’m asking myself the question, What is this thing? This coffin-like thing? And the answer I keep getting is that it’s a weapon.

McMoneagle added that he saw “a concrete structure, like a canal in Holland.” That the Soviets would build a submarine inside this building, and not in a dry dock located at the water’s edge, seemed to defy logic. The building in the picture was roughly one hundred yards from the shore at the naval yard; nor was any canal visible—only flat, frozen Earth.

Four months after this session, however, new images captured by the satellite over Severodvinsk sent shock waves through the intelligence community. They revealed a massive submarine tethered alongside a dock as well as a channel that had evidently been recently dynamited between the building and the dock. It was now clear that the Soviets had covertly constructed a prototype for an entirely new generation of nuclear-powered ballistic missile submarine. The Russian code name was акула, which translates as shark.

Psychokinesis: Mind Over Matter

Since time immemorial, oral and written traditions worldwide have claimed that certain people are capable of influencing physical reality with their mind alone. From 1979 to 2007, the Princeton Engineering Anomalies Research program (PEAR) was finally able to verify this claim with iron-clad experimental rigor.

In the PEAR lab, a random event generator (REG) was used, essentially a computerized coin-flipper executing one flip per second. Experimental subjects (called “operators”) were asked to try to influence the machine’s data output by directing conscious intent toward a higher or lower ratio of heads over tails. The Psi Encyclopedia explains,

In the original “benchmark” REG experiment, the difference between high and low conditions in 2.5 million trials over twelve years of efforts by 91 operators is highly significant with odds of about 15,000 to 1 against chance as an explanation.

For a good overview of this PEAR research, see the short documentary Heretic: Robert Jahn, and for granular detail, there is Jahn and Dunne’s book Margins of Reality: The Role of Consciousness in the Physical World. Psychokinesis experiments run by Dean Radin have subsequently replicated PEAR’s findings and taken them even further; see his excellent lecture “Science and the taboo of psi” on the Google Tech Talks channel.

The Bottom Line

It’s hypothesized that AGI (Artificial General Intelligence) will soon emerge and soon thereafter ASI (Artificial Superintelligence), surpassing the smartest human minds in every domain of cognition. The crux of the issue, of course, is flagged by the words smartest and cognition. When consciousness is engaged in telepathy, remote viewing, or psychokinesis, it is not being smart or processing information, or not primarily. It is busy instead breaking free of those categories and opening into direct communion with reality itself, of which computers can never be more than a subset.

Wake me when an AI agent is ready to report what I just dreamed.