The most relevant fact about the immensely disorganized research scheme known as Artificial Intelligence is that, as of late 2011, there has not been a single instant of machine generated awareness, emotion, feeling, or sensation ever.
Not one moment of pleasure or pain, or even the faintest twitch of ennui.
Even a worm has more real awareness than the entire Internet.
So far, no one has managed to figure out even the first principle of awareness. We just don't have a clue.
Once software can have actual feelings, there will be ethical dilemmas and potential horror scenarios no one has dared to imagine, but it seems that won't happen for years to come.
Some problems may actually be too simple to understand.
Paradoxes and thought experiments like Searle's Chinese Room and the 'Hard Problem' can currently only be solved with wordplay, undefined terms, and obscurantism: for example, 'quantity equals quality'; or compared to the universe as a whole, the human mind is so small the mystery shrinks to zero.
The best guess is that consciousness is a massively parallel process: incredibly redundant and impossibly flexible.
A full explanation of all the mysteries of the mind would be perfectly clear. It would just be too big to view every part at once; a flowchart covering several walls, all interconnected. It would be impossible to understand the thing as a whole.
Thousands of separate problems would have to be explained first.
According to the theory of digital reality, everything starts from nothing; or at least the minimal amounts of something - one and zero.
By combining enough identical elements (leaving plenty of irregular gaps) every simple and complex pattern, object, and thought can be recreated.
Quadrillions of repetitive cell functions create the full digital complexity of the mind. A century of massive mechanical operations could barely simulate one second of pain.
One reason the brain can't understand itself is because it's constantly simplifying the internal description of its environment, erasing all the paths not taken.
Humans are always looking for the hidden possibilities around them. Most are instantly rejected, leaving no conscious traces in the mind. This massive but hidden erasure must be as necessary to consciousness as the final succinct description, or else books and diagrams would be aware.
It's like trying to imagine the complete contents of a library at once. Most thoughts prevent most other thoughts.
The mind is a gateway. It's not designed to access itself. In many ways, there is nothing to access.
It's packed with about ten million high-level connections, with no deeper meaning than the organism's survival in a random environment. Each connection would require a thousand book-length texts to describe in words. They can be regarded as separate programs, with many gaps between them.
Maybe there are no universal principles, only arbitrary situations and outcomes. The mind molds itself into a copy of the outside world as if to merge with it.
At the same time, the mind is all there is to itself. Awareness is not reality, but its own biased reaction to reality.
A sense of self emerges around the axis of a personal whirlpool universe.
The admittedly immense capacity of the human brain seems less impressive seen from the inside. The brain can't even solve a simple sixteen bit math problem by itself. Human students take forever to memorize new words or concepts, or learn extremely difficult skills like touch typing. Many never manage the task at all.
If the brain is like a computer, it's even worse than Windows.
The highest level of human awareness may be a simple flowchart linking a few dozen brain areas, a rigid operating system that defines and locks in everyone's personality. All the main structures were discovered centuries ago.
With so many attributes allowing an incalculable number of potential thoughts, human behavior is surprisingly limited. Humans have less free will than commonly believed. They often find themselves doing things they don't expect, as if on auto response. It's as if people have evolved to be as much alike as possible.
This might lead to the first useful lie detector test in the near future.
Even if it had only a 51% accuracy rate, a 90% or better accuracy rate could be achieved by running it a few dozen times in a row.
Perception is less reliable than it seems.
The vast array of reported paranormal occurrences and phenomena seems real, not because the human mind is amazingly complex, but because it is too simple. Memory is particularly unreliable in often creative ways.
Things seem uncanny not because of the fear of the unknown, but because of the subconscious realization that some important insight has been missed.
The potential limits of awareness are unknowable, especially in a quantum universe full of parallel timestreams.
By recreating past thoughts, the memories of past events and possibly even the truth of what actually happened could conceivably be changed.
It may be possible to create 'virtual awareness' across time and space. Any complex pattern could be interpreted as being a form of awareness.
Ultimately, even something like religion may become a type of science. The final goal of all sentience might be to organize all knowledge, simplifying and compressing the truth in the most efficient way, leading to one final summation, but that might take a while.
The long-term future will be dominated by the 'gray fog' theory.
During the eras of painful improvement and complex merging that lie ahead, the human form of unified and hierarchical consciousness will become obsolete.
There will be many local concentrations of intelligence that can rearrange themselves as needed, but fewer permanent identities. Eventually, all awareness in the observable universe may be connected, forming a single network with no overriding passions or goals, like an indifferent god.
This process is already starting in our time.
Humans are becoming increasingly specialized, relying on each other and external data devices like notebooks and the Internet to remember things and make decisions.
In fact the ability to make such connections may be what led to human language and intelligence in the first place.
How do we know that reality isn't changing around us all the time while we aren't paying attention, along with all our memories? Most details of our lives are arbitrary, and could be rearranged any number of ways.
Surprisingly, postmodern literary criticism has already anticipated this problem from the other side, emphasizing the power of synonyms and symbols.
Hidden inside every text there are many other texts with not a single word in common. It's easy to keep adding explanations and new content, elaborating endlessly from different contexts.
Some interpreted texts have contradictory subjects and meanings, with implied biases and hidden assumptions, and ever more remote worldviews.
Any language can generate absurd statements that sound like permitted statements ('a handful of electrons').
For every statement, the listener has to ask, what was the reason for making this statement?
Reality can appear to change merely by looking at it differently. Awareness is not just an illusion but a delusion.
The brain works by adding new layers to an evolving simulation, slowly overwriting older memory models.
Long term memories are created by repeating thoughts in many different ways.
The detection of any important insight (good or bad), stimulates the creation of many parallel circuits in the mind.
Different brain areas hold overlapping elements of the same thought, and elements of the same plan.
Sometimes, the only way such remote circuits can effectively communicate is through stress hormones, changing blood pressure and heart rate, or even by thinking out loud.
The core insight is that awareness is not unified.
The mind is divided into many discrete sections that try to manipulate and control each other.
It's hard to hold on to the same thought for longer than a few seconds.
Consciousness is the ultimate paradox: an accurate and succinct (but highly simplified) representation of all the things the mind is not fully aware of, like a permanent placeholder.
The best hard SF novel ever written: Infinite Thunder by Jack Arcalon.
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