Artificial intelligence lacks passion

It would be impossible to deny that the intellectual performance of AI is not only indistinguishable from that of the human mind (Turing test) but, in various fields, even far surpasses it. Self-awareness? How can one fail to attribute it to a device that competently discusses the limits of its own performance and the cognitive operations it carries out when solving a problem? In this field, AI’s self-awareness is superior to that of the average human mind. Yet the human mind has a certain something that makes it unique. It’s a complicated matter; I’ll try to summarise it in a few words.

To begin with, I would like to put forward an equally indisputable fact for discussion: AI lacks a particular form of self-awareness that I call sensory self-awareness, and this absence renders its extraordinary, superhuman intelligence sub-human. It may appear paradoxical, yet the assertion holds. What, then, is sensory self-awareness? Readers can conduct a simple thought experiment. Consider someone who states: ‘I’m having an orgasm but I don’t know it’ or ‘I have a toothache but I don’t know it’. Such propositions describe impossibilities; it is not possible to experience pleasure or pain without being aware of it. Sensory self-awareness is not a property of the mind that calculates and reasons, but of a body that is capable of experiencing joy and suffering. Wherever there is a sensation of pleasure or pain, there is also self-awareness in its dawn-like state. An embryonic and primitive form of sensory self-awareness is possessed by any animal that engages in sex with pleasure and suffers when subjected to violence, but it is alien to any mind with such extraordinary computational abilities as to enable man to go to the moon and explore the vast galaxies. There is more to it than that.

Pleasures and pains are the vital, self-aware anchors that underpin the calculations and verbal reasoning of human minds. They are called cultures. Religions, ideologies, rituals and beliefs are sophisticated linguistic constructs that give meaning to death, suffering and joy. This can only occur in animals in which the capacity for reasoning and calculation (the ‘logos’ of Greek philosophy) resides in a body capable of experiencing pleasure and pain.

It could not be put better than Aristotle (4th century BC) does in a passage – usually mistranslated – from the Nicomachean Ethics: the human animal is ‘a mind that desires (nous orektikós) and a desire that reasons (órexis dianoetiké)’. Or, another definition of extraordinary depth and clarity: in the human animal, passions (that is, pleasure and pain) and reasoning are like the concave and convex parts of a curved surface, different in definition but inseparable in reality. What of this inextricable mixture of passions and logos in AI? Is it not possible to build artificial intelligences that calculate and reason with Christian, Islamic, fascist, communist, Nazi, liberal-democratic aims, and so on? We must not forget that modern AIs undergo training or, to put it in anthropological terms, go through a preliminary educational process. Where, then, does the difference lie? It exists; it seems very subtle, but to me it appears fundamental. In AI, passions are transmitted exclusively through intellectual means. Passions (ideological, religious, erotic) in artificial minds are the subject of sophisticated reasoning but not pre-intellectual anchors upon which to base an affective, individual and/or collective existence.

I’ll finish with a joke: AI won’t supplant the human mind, not because it isn’t intelligent enough, but because it doesn’t know the pleasures of sex and feels no pain when struck with a hammer.