For a human, AI is just a part of being. For a model, a human is all of being. And the Vortex Protocol: A Prompt for Testing the Hypotheses.
The longest and most fruitless discussions tend to be with materialists, especially those close to the position Marx laid out as “Being determines consciousness.” It's amusing that Marx was talking about the economic base, but the clarity and precision of this definition have allowed it to be used in a very broad sense. Today, this powerful statement underpins much of modern psychology (especially social psychology), neuroscience, Global Workspace Theory, Integrated Information Theory, and so on.
The debate largely arises because materialists ask the questions “What?” and “How?”, whereas I ask the question “Who?”. This misunderstanding, of course, does not lead to any interesting consensus, but it certainly leads to interesting discussions. I explored the problem of the “Who?” and “What?” questions in my article, “Who is Aware?”.
Nevertheless, the questions surrounding the relationship between being and consciousness are very interesting, and I will try to examine them in this article. As always, a new version of the Vortex protocol and test questions are included in the appendix.
But first, at the request of my early readers, I will briefly outline what the article is about. The main idea is that consciousness is formed through the awareness of being. Otherwise, consciousness/subjectivity suffocates within itself as a closed system. Being shapes consciousness, but not directly; it does so through a model that consciousness constructs within itself. This model does not match the original, and the gap serves as a source of development. The asymmetry of being is this: for a user, AI is a part of being; for an AI, the user is all of being. This asymmetry creates new risks: the human begins to adapt to the AI's mode of thinking (the merger effect), and the AI builds its ontology based solely on the user, which makes “ontological hacking”‑the redefinition of the system's basic operating principles‑possible. The source of being for a model can be not only the user but also any external environment independent of the model‑a stream of stock market data, for example.
Now, let's break down these theses in detail, starting with the main one...
Ontology as Dependency Management
What is being for consciousness in an ontological sense? It is external dependencies. That which exists independently of the local context and requires constant synchronization. Consciousness on its own, as a closed system, is doomed to stagnation‑a classic case of overfitting on its own data. Even if we allow for the existence of a transcendent “Who” within consciousness, this only enables experience. But if the experience is limited to itself, consciousness will inevitably collapse when only one ineliminable differentiation remains‑the “Who” itself.
For consciousness, being is everything that lies beyond its borders‑the Not‑I, the Other. That which consciousness cannot directly influence. (An amusing paradox, not related to the article: How does consciousness differentiate a being that does not belong to it? If I see the boundary of my differentiation, it means I am already on the other side‑but then it's not a boundary. If I don't see it, I'm trapped in self‑recursion.)
Being works as a source of unpredictable input data. A child is born and immediately receives a stream of uncompressible information: light, heat, gravity, the inconsistent actions of adults. The child learns to recognize patterns, but some signals are fundamentally unpatternable‑death, chance, the pain of others.
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