Are AIs Conscious in FMT?

A popular question actively discussed in today's world is whether AIs are conscious or may become conscious in the future. Since FMT suggests that mind is widespread in the universe, let's explore what the theory say about this topic.

The short answer is no, the software that creates AI intelligence is completely mindless. That said, the computer platforms that host AI software have rudimentary minds in FMT.

Computer Minds

Cells, organelles, and complex molecules inside cells have flexible physical structures that move, communicate, and interact with other forms of matter. These behaviors are enabled by the dynamic electromagnetic field that surrounds and pervades their physical structures to enable their minds to influence the behavior of their bodies. Complex minds in FMT require a flexible and electromagnetically dynamic matter substrate to be able to store and retrieve information, process information, receive and decode signals, form and transmit signals, form memories, develop more complex intelligence, all of which leads to more complex collective mental experiences. 

The collective mind of the subatomic particles that form a computer lack the type of flexible, dynamic, electromagnetically active substrate that is essential for minds to combine to form more complex minds. On the one hand the computer chips that process information and run algorithms certainly have a huge amount of electrons flowing their transistors and logic circuits, which certainly qualifies as an electromagnetically active substrate.

On the other hand, all modern electronic devices use a significant amount of shielding to prevent electromagnetic signals flowing in one circuit from interfering with signals flowing in other nearby circuits. As engineers shrink modern chip transistors to the nanometer scale, shielding becomes ever more important to prevent crosstalk and leakage currents from creating electromagnetic interference (EMI) that can cause data errors.

The shielding embedded within all modern electronics would thus prevent the electromagnetic emissions that combine rudimentary minds from forming more complex minds, eliminating the possibility of advanced intelligence and complex subjective experience in their matter structures.  Each individual silicon transistor, plus some nearby copper, aluminum, and tungsten atoms within the shielded transistor portion of the chip will form a nanoscale matter mind. But by design these minds cannot combine electromagnetically due to the shielding, thus a modern computer chip contains trillions of tiny isolated nanoscale matter minds. This leads to the question of whether quantum computers may have minds, and might they be more complex than the minds of electronic computers?

Quantum Computer Minds

The short answer is yes quantum computers also have minds, but no they are not more complex than traditional computers, they are less complex. Quantum computers process quantum bits, or qubits, as opposed to digital 1's and 0's. Like the transistors in computer chips, qubits are also electromagnetically isolated and shielded to prevent them from interfering with each other. But qubits have a much smaller matter substrate than transistors hence have less complex minds.

Quantum computers are also designed to operate a few degrees absolute zero to reduce quantum scale noise. That supercooling is necessary to create a functional quantum computing substrate has led scientists to conclude that the human mind cannot involve quantum processes because biology operates on a flexible, wet, warm, and electromagnetically unshielded substrate. FMT views this as a flawed assumption and in fact draws the exact opposite conclusion. The flexible, wet, warm, electromagnetically active substrate of living matter is required for complex minds to exist. Supercooled quantum computers operate reliably because the extreme low temperatures likely prevent the quantum scale mind of qubits from influencing the behavior of their matter substrates. Quantum biology continues to discover quantum effects in living matter, from photosynthesis in plants to birds using the earth's electromagnetic field as a GPS system to navigate long distances.

Mindless AI

Regardless of computing platform, AIs are software programs consisting of a set of abstract rules and algorithms that define how their underlying computing platforms should process information. AIs are literally lines of computer code.

AIs cannot have a mind in FMT because they lack a matter substrate. One might challenge this view by noting that AI algorithms consists of trillions of ones and zeroes (bits) stored in memory chips, which provide a physical substrate. But the ones and zeroes are literally individual transistors in an open (0) or closed (1) state that are completely shielded from each other to prevent memory integrity issues.

An AI program that contains 1 trillion bits of code is stored on 1 trillion electromagnetically isolated transistors that have no awareness of each other. Whether any given transistor is in a 1 or 0 state is irrelevant to its internal experience of being manipulated by outside environmental forces that apply and remove power to its gate to flip its output state between 1 and 0. It is the individual transistors that have minds in FMT, not the collective sequence of states of the isolated transistors that encode AI algorithms.

The electromagnetic shielding of modern electronics is needed to literally prevent "cross-talk" between transistors, allowing their behavior to be rigidly controlled to process human generated information. The intelligence of an AI system is derived by the mindless and matterless pattern of 1's and 0's interacting with a vast array of isolated transistor inputs and outputs in a highly structured computing platform that collectively gives the illusion of intelligence.

Where AI May Present the Biggest Threat

Researchers at Georgia Tech cultured rat neurons and connected them to a computer that hosted a simulated world, which these hybrid biological-machine creatures (called "hybrots") learned to successively explore and navigate their virtual world. A number of biological computing startups and groups within big tech companies are racing to bring their products to market. An example is Cortical Labs which cultures human stem cells to create what they call a "cortical cloud" that offers an intelligent cloud based AI platform. Living cells networked together and connected to supporting electronic systems certainly have far more complex minds than conventional computers. These AI bio-computers will have awareness of their external world and their behaviors are unlikely to be limited by the algorithms they will be fed. Think of Skynet from the terminator movies.

Adding robotic bodies to biological computers likely lies in our not-too-distant future. Think many terminators linked via Skynet. Bio-AI platforms represents the biggest existential threat to humanity, much more so than conventional AI or quantum AI computing platforms. Imagine a large number of highly intelligent biological organisms wirelessly networked together, with artificial sensory systems far superior to humans, immense memory storage with instant access to everything on the Internet, complete knowledge of all scientific evidence and theories, incredible processing speeds, collectively rewriting their own code to rapidly evolve, with the awareness of humans who think they are the masters....