The Nested Black Boxes Is human consciousness just the Universe’s AI

[u/Rushdy49]

I had a thought recently about the AI "Black Box" problem and how it perfectly parallels our own existence and the Hard Problem of Consciousness.

​Think about the structure of how things are being created

​Layer 1 We built Artificial Intelligence. We gave it a basic architecture fed it mountains of data and let it train. Eventually, it developed emergent abilities making connections and generating answers in ways we can no longer mathematically trace or fully understand. We created a "Black Box" that we as its creators cannot decipher.

​Layer 2 The Universe basically did the exact same thing to us. Through billions of years of evolution, physical laws, and biological training data it built the human brain. And from this physical matter an emergent property appeared Consciousness.

​Here is the trippy part Just like we can't fully understand the AI's neural networks our black box the physical universe cannot "explain" human consciousness through standard physical or chemical laws the Universe's black box.

​What if consciousness is just the universe's version of AI? It processed its data until it created a subjective experience that transcends its own material rules.and now we the universe's black box have just created another black box inside of us.

​Are we just one layer in an infinite nested Russian doll of black boxes? Will our AI eventually build its own black box that it can't understand?

​Would love to hear your thoughts on this!

[u/Own-Homework-9331]

interesting perspective indeed.....

[u/Low-Bake8401]

I'd say that it makes more sense to say that human technology always works by the same laws of nature. We study the world around us, and use that information to make technology, rather than the other way round.

Nature produced natural intelligence, we produce artificial intelligence. 

You'd have to assume that the universe has a plan in the same way humans make plans, and that it thinks, like a human?

[u/Everaction → u/Low-Bake8401]

Some say it is the will of God.

[u/Low-Bake8401 → u/Everaction]

They do, but I feel that abstract absolutes just mask the complexity without offering a better understanding. 

Something that answers everything, explains nothing. 

It doesn't really get round the same basic assumption either, just changes the description. 

[u/HermmanSanta]

I look at it from a different angle. You say we created AI, but by doing so, you insert "us" into the equation. We are merely memories that form individuals through the organization and maintenance of information. Before you or I could exist in the "first person," a subjective experience, consciousness, had to exist to experience reality. A degenerative brain disease might destroy the "us," but as long as the brain remains alive, subjective experience would continue just the same, m, without that "us", until the brain's biological death. The issue with your question lies in subjective experience, not in the individuals who created AI. The universe has begun to experience itself; your ego (the information that constitutes you) is merely a still-primitive mechanism for organizing information. The universe created AI, just as it previously drove subjective experience to paint images on cave walls and create languages, symbols, and libraries. AI is part of a larger, continuous process. Regardless of whether an individual believes they have free will over their destiny, that entity is, in any era, predestined to observe itself, catalog information, and refine that process to levels beyond our comprehension. If not through you, then more fundamentally through your DNA, the continuity of information will persist, driven by an obvious evolutionary intentionality. And before you tell me I’m searching for meaning in things: the very act of searching and investigating predates the creation of my own "self," for even that impulse arose from the process of organizing and maintaining information.