Are humans really wonderful beings or are they a plague? Sometimes, especially when dealing with people, we are not at all sure. A few days ago, there was a fire in my parents’ house. They are elderly. Suddenly, flames shot out of the basement windows and the first floor filled with thick smoke. Their lives could have been in danger. But things turned out differently. The fire department was notified immediately and arrived on the scene quickly. Neighbors came to help and offered us a place to stay for the night. Everything went very smoothly. When someone is in trouble, others help. This applies to personal relationships, but it is also reflected in the willingness of people to donate when something terrible happens somewhere in the world. We humans are clearly wired to cooperate. But sometimes it is the complete opposite. “How can people do such things?” is the intuitive question we have when assassination attempts, torture, and wars are once again reported in the news around the world.
“Man, a strange creature, with his feet in the mud and his head in the stars,” is how the German-Jewish author Else Lasker-Schuler (1869-1945) expressed the dilemma: is man a wonderful being or a pitiful species? Or, in more contemporary terms, is Homo sapiens the pinnacle of creation or a plague on the planet?
Recently, a young professor invited me for an interview on his YouTube channel. He is a physicist, and from the very beginning he has been asking me about modern conundrums on the border between technology and philosophy. Will artificial intelligence one day become conscious? If so, should such intelligence also be given human rights? And why should robots, which are in many ways superior to humans, not be given human dignity? These are indeed great questions. Why should humans be privileged? If “consciousness”, “intelligence” and even “free will” are no longer valid as distinguishing features, do humans lose the right to special treatment? The inquisitive interviewer challenged me with these topics in order to answer what will become one of the most important questions of the future: “What are we and what makes us special?”
Photo by Terricks Noah / Unsplash
My answer started with a paradox. It is not a question of when artificial intelligence will become conscious, because there is no such thing as artificial intelligence. What we call AI is an extremely fast simulation of decision-making processes, generating results from the vast amounts of data available on the network that at first glance resemble the achievement of intelligent activity. But it is not intelligence. Intellegere is Latin and means “to understand, to recognize.” When an algorithm selects a supposedly correct answer from millions of text modules, who is the one who understands? If there is no one who understands and recognizes something, there is no understanding or recognition. “Artificial intelligence” is not more intelligent than a calculator or a library. Just because both can be used to find something quickly does not mean that there is an intelligence there to understand something.
The idea that consciousness can emerge from AI is based on a misunderstanding. Our consciousness is not an abstract state that arises in any material, like the relationship between frozen and liquid matter. Consciousness is a human condition. In fact, I don’t even know if my neighbor sees the grass green as green as I do.
The consciousness that defines our essence as human beings is characterized by a first-person perspective, an introspection from which we cannot fully detach ourselves. But that is not the whole truth.
We are social beings, we exist in a space of common language, common behavior, and diverse social interdependence, and therefore we feel our consciousness connected to the consciousness of others. In fact, infants only gradually develop self-awareness. Before they learn to say “I”, they say “Mama”, sense the gaze of others, and gradually become aware of themselves. “Man becomes ‘I’ through ‘Thou'”, explains philosopher Martin Buber. Thus, attributing consciousness to others is as natural for us humans as experiencing ourselves as conscious beings. We cannot do otherwise. We are firm believers in the fact that from the very beginning consciousness is my own consciousness and at the same time directed towards other people. There is no such thing as abstract consciousness, because abstracting from the point of view of my own experience is a purely imaginative experiment.
Self-portrait by Ibreem/Flickr.
Everything that is perceived is perceived by someone. This immediately makes sense if we ask ourselves: how can we read a book without someone to read it? A copy machine can scan the pages, but it cannot understand the content of the book. Perception belongs to someone who can say “I”. Of course, this does not mean that the world exists precisely because someone perceives it, but in the sense that consciousness always contains a first-person perspective. How the world looks through the eyes of another person remains a fascinating and unsolvable mystery. And yet, we naturally assume that other people also relate to the world. Otherwise, our language would make no sense at all. In fact, we have always realized, and apparently successfully, that language allows us to act together in the world. Thoughts are also always my own, but only in social spaces. After all, we did not invent language as individuals. We treat people and things differently because we cannot completely separate “myself” from other people who say “I”.
In the Critique of Practical Reason, one of the most important chapters on ethics, Immanuel Kant writes that human beings are beings that have not only value but also dignity. This means that, although objects can be used, human beings must not be treated as mere means. A stone has no first-person perspective, it is not a human being. If a stone is used as a means to build a house, this does not contradict its essence. Human dignity, on the other hand, presupposes that if a person is used as a mere means, his essence is completely negated. Everyone feels this intuitively when they feel exploited, manipulated, or abused. It is precisely for this reason that slavery and human trafficking are crimes against human dignity. In the face of the person who faces me, there is a request: “Treat me not as an object, but as a human being, for I, like you, have in me a mystical first-person perspective. After all, you cannot see through me, and the world seen through my eyes looks different from the world seen through someone else’s eyes. “
In addition to the unique features of humans being always conscious as first-person subjects and always socially entangled, humans have another feature that makes them fundamentally different from machines: our consciousness is embodied. Our perception of the world is inseparable from our perception of our own body. I see a tree because I am physically standing in front of it. When I climb the branches, I see it differently. When I touch the tree, when I smell it, when I hear the leaves rustling in the wind, I perceive even more. All this happens through my physical senses. I feel the bark of the tree because I feel my palms against it. So consciousness does not reside in the body the way a genie resides in a bottle, but consciousness and body are intimately intertwined. There is no perception that is independent of our physical senses. We live in this world as physical beings, as material human beings.
Photo by Rachel McDermott/Unsplash
We do not only exist in the world, but also experience it emotionally. We can be tired, grumpy, happy, interested, in love, angry. All these things color our experience and shape and determine how we perceive the world. Our moods and emotions are also inseparable from our bodies. The world affects us differently when we are hungry or stressed. And hunger and stress have physical reasons. Each of us is a living, living body, consciousness and body united. And as this unity, we are also inhabitants of an ethical and meaningful world from the beginning of our life. This starts from the fact that when we perceive the world, we always unconsciously choose what to pay attention to, what is important for us. The right way to live, what is good and true, where to direct our energy, where to keep our distance. All this is already imprinted in the fundamental place where we find ourselves in life.
This mysterious entanglement is the source of our dignity and our greatest vulnerability. If we could simply ignore how we are treated by others, we would be much less vulnerable. Humans are infinitely vulnerable to evil. And since only humans are actually free to treat each other how they want, and are not bound by the instinct to treat each other well, we too can commit evil. A lion eats a gazelle, and no one would ever think of calling this behavior evil. A lion would never have to answer in court. But we humans call certain actions of others and ourselves evil. This is the only reason we have jurisdiction and laws, because we think that we have certain rights and therefore also certain obligations. It sounds like a philosophically abstract question, but it becomes very important in the study of AI. If a self-driving car hits a person, who is responsible? You can’t actually put the car on trial. Humans are the plague of the earth, the only species capable of destroying the entire world. We sometimes hear this word in the context of ecological discussions. But the flip side is often overlooked. Only humans can do evil because only humans can do good. Squirrels don’t do the moral good when they care for their offspring; they do so instinctively, without having to weigh one moral good against another. But humans do. Good is by no means always the easy path, but humans often do good nonetheless.
So why does man have dignity? Because we humans have something that does not exist elsewhere in the visible creation: mind, consciousness, the ability to ask moral and aesthetic questions. Why does man have all this? A purely biological view of man cannot answer this question, and why should it? After all, biology looks at all living things only from the point of view of their natural properties. But we humans are not obliged to see ourselves as merely biological beings. On the contrary, choosing what is ethically good often means directly avoiding a choice in accordance with the law. And this choice may be an obvious choice from a biological point of view. Man also belongs to another order of existence – the spirit. Where biology must be silent, religious interpretation begins. In the image of the Creator himself. This is how the biblical creation story sees our place in the universe.
In times like these, when humans are called “a plague on the planet” among the climate movement’s radicals and authors such as Yuval Noah Harari describe us as animals with “hackable” software in our brains – computers, after all – it’s important to speak again about the dignity of Homo sapiens. Humanity must be protected from those who despise it.
