Thoughts About Philosophy, Psychology, and Artificial Intelligence

Join me in a moment of psychological skydiving, as we delve very deep into the following thought-provoking topics...

Muscle Memory and The Subconscious

Though consciousness could manifest voluntarily or involuntarily, it can really be used to define a person’s overall identity. This is because, to begin with, habits are first suggested by our brains, formed by our habits, and solidified by our ongoing choices. Since that is true, then we can acknowledge the idea that our conscious or subconscious minds can in fact define who we really are.

For instance, if you are a musician, your hands, as well as any other part of your body that you use to play the musical instrument of your choice would just do the things they are trained for whenever you perform. How good or bad you may turn out to be on stage would be surely defined by hard you practiced the musical piece you have chosen.

If you practiced hard enough, then you will most likely give out a pristine and impeccable performance. But if you did not give ample time to master the piece, there will be a great room for mistakes as you perform, it is just common knowledge.

But then there is also this thing called “stage fright,” which is oftentimes, just a manifestation of our subconscious. Depending on your level of exposure to audiences, the effect that stage fright could give you could greatly vary. For some, it could just be a slight rise of heartbeats per second. For others, it could be an intense shaking of the hands of the other parts of the body.

Either way, consciousness could really make or break a person’s endeavor in any given instance that is why, it has to be thoroughly mastered over, though of course, no human can ever have full control over it. Whatever is the task that a person constantly deals with in his or her daily life, it is undeniable that consciousness can in fact be a means of establishing a pattern of one’s identity traits.

Errors In Perception and The Placebo Effect

It mainly talks about the human senses, which makes it clear that at some levels, Qualia could just be an error of perception, or an illusion, so to speak. The basic sensations of saltiness, sweetness, sourness and the likes of them are of course very real. Thanks to our taste buds, they are easily identifiable and distinguishable from each other.

But questions like, “How salty? How sweet? How sour?" - these could have varying answers. While some might declare a certain chocolate drink to be very sweet, others would just call it plain or average. There is of course the general labeling of what is really sweet, or salty, or sour according to typical perception. But it has to be noted also that each person could have varying levels on how to really gauge them one by one.

Another thing that must be included in this discussion is that there is a term called “Placebo Effect.” The simplest way to define it is that, it is a feeling or sensation that results from the power of suggestion. For instance, a patient might feel intense pain from a surgical wound only a few minutes after the surgery, though it usually takes hours for a standard dosage of anesthesia to fully lose its effect.

Some nurses are even known to put pure distilled water inside a syringe and inject it to the patient so that the latter would just stop complaining about the pain. Thinking that it was real anesthesia, the patient would then have this false sense of relief. It is proof that Qualia could actually be in fact perceived as just an illusion.

Artificial Intelligence and Human Emotions

In both printed and visual media, we see robots fighting people, falling in love, and ruling the world. While such ideas are just figments of a brilliant writer’s fertile mind, it cannot be denied that robots and AI systems are already playing huge roles in almost any industry you can name. In factories, hospitals, and even in the field of religion, computerized systems that can appear to think are being utilized by people to make tasks and various transactions faster and easier.

In relevance to that, a very important question must be asked, “Can machines really think the way humans can?” In the field of robotics nowadays, experts claim that the current intelligence robots are currently having is on the same level as that of a cockroach.

This means that for the time being, they are only good at identifying a very limited set of patterns: walking through an open door, climbing upstairs, evade incoming objects, and say a few pre-programmed words. In the next hundred years, experts estimate that robots could be as smart as monkeys, and that would be the time when they will be a little more dangerous.

In a few more hundred years, they could be as smart as dogs, or even dolphins. Whether that can be affirmative or not is still a mystery since many AI scientists have already lived their entire lives researching the field while achieving only very little increments of success.

The smartest AI systems today are still so crude that the dumbest child can even be declared as dozens of times smarter than the world’s smartest robot. This is evidenced by the fact that an infant can effortlessly recognize his or her mother’s face and a pre-schooler can easily sort out pictures of cartoonish figures of alphabetic characters.

Amazingly though, such an act is still quite hard for computers, even the fastest and most powerful of them. Sure, there are speech-to-text computer programs today that can create written transcripts of a person’s voice, and there are also optical-recognition systems that can convert handwritten text into computerized form.

But many skilled humans can easily read bad handwriting at blinding speeds. But when the process is done by a computer though, it will result in a set of erroneous data, something that we humans would find very laughable. For the time being, it is very safe to say that machines are still incapable of thinking the way a human can.

Cultural Backgrounds and Belief Systems

Regardless of a person’s upbringing or cultural background, he must have a belief system of some kind: one that guides his principles in life, and in choosing the best decisions that life may bring. Because of the established belief systems of the society that people are so accustomed to already, we can hear about radical and absurd ideas that could sometimes be harmful to a certain person or those that are around them.

For instance, there are certain religious precepts that would their members perform heinous acts of crime. Some fathers are known to slaughter their own children just for the sake of upholding the spiritual guidelines that they are brainwashed with. Some are even known to take their own lives just so they can attain the highest level of spiritual elation promised to them.

So should beliefs be always based on logic and rationality, the safest answer would be an absolute yes. Although we cannot deny the efficacy of religion in making a better version of ourselves, it would be wise to weigh things heavily upon choosing to be affiliated with one. While some people just follow the rules of religion just to feel better about themselves, obeying some religious leaders could be truly harmful.

For instance, some of them would preach about the end of the world. Because their followers obey them blindly, they would often do drastic things like selling their possessions, or giving up their livelihoods just because of the belief that the world is really coming to an end. We have heard such kinds of falsehoods over the generations. Sadly, such a kind of notion still exists even in these modern times.

While the concept of beliefs does not only apply to religion but in other areas of life as well, we have to acknowledge the importance of this conclusion: that belief systems regardless of the category they might belong should be always based on logic and rationality.