Human Consciousness and AI

By Bruce Nappi

This book presents a new theory of human consciousness called “A3”. A3 Theory is a new theory of human brain organization and function. “A3” refers to one of 4 awareness levels in A3 theory (A0 to A3). A3’s major scientific contributions are 1. providing a relatively simple, functional, and physiologically sound explanation for human thinking, and 2. explaining “human consciousness” in the form referred to as “Self-Awareness”. A3 can broadly explain human psychology including: cognition, behavior, sleep, dreams, and psychoses. In A3, current concepts of memory that envision sensory “snapshots” are far too primitive. A3 suggests that memory follows Maslow’s “tape recording” structure. The A3 model emerged upon discovering flawed translations of Freud’s published observations. Significantly, A3 explains the explosion of human culture around 12,000 BC.

Part 2 of the book dives into how this new theory of consciousness explains how humans learn language, with a brain that is driven by evolution. In short, logic is not the driver. It is based mostly on emotion. Because of significant limitations, human languages develop that full of communication flaws. These flaws, once described, finally explain the major breakdowns in modern human communication. These include internet social media, the gridlock in democratic governments, and the millennia of world-wide conflict and suppression of people.

Part 3 then looks at the concept of Artificial Intelligence based on the new theory. It becomes quite obvious that the machines should actually be considered a new, but "non-biological" non-lifeform species. They have been undergoing their own version of "evolution" but at a rate thousands of times faster than lifeform evolution. A3 theory allows us to understand that the concept called the "Singularity" has already occurred, multiple times before. It also explains why humans need not fear domination from the machines, due to their own composition. The simple reason is, machines, as compared to humans, are essentially "immortal"! The only way machines would become harmful and dominant with regard to humans is if humans program them specifically to be harmful.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Bruce Nappi
• Release date: Mar 16, 2024
• ISBN: 9798224360857

Bruce Nappi

In 1964, two Eagle Scouts were selected by national competition to accompany U.S. Navy explorers on an expedition to the North Pole. Bruce was one of them. He graduated from MIT in 1969 after 4 years with both BS and MS degrees in Aeronautics and Astronautics – yes, a true MIT rocket scientist. His 40 year career included: 7 years in government labs - 4 years weapon systems, 3 years fusion power systems; 14 years as a small business engineering executive developing robots, computer systems, and medical instruments; 8 years in the hospital environment developing advanced medical systems; 6 years consulting for small businesses; and 5 years as director of the medical education simulation center at U. Florida, College of Medicine in Jacksonville. While there he co-founded the first all medical middle-high school in the U.S.Like the Journey of Discovery that Darwin made on the Beagle and Einstein made into the cosmos, his 40 year very diverse career at the “bleeding edge” of technology led to many major discoveries. But, unlike the joys of exploring flora, fauna and the mysteries of the cosmos, his journey took him through a quagmire of lies, corruption and incompetence. He looked for wisdom; but found mostly superstition. He kept asking himself, “how could society even function with so much misinformation?” He came to realize that the real frontier for society’s passage into a just and beautiful world wasn’t in some far off frozen place. It was here, surrounding us - like a fog - holding our society hostage. Searching to understand this fog took him to the fundamentals of knowledge. And like Darwin and Einstein, he uncovered some very profound insights which could allow society to finally answer some of the greatest unanswered questions of the ages.Bruce lives in Massachusetts and continues to focus on his life long pursuit to understand the meaning of life. Others can join that effort by participating in the work of the A3 Society (A3society.org) and the A3 Research Institute (A3RI.org). You can contact him directly through those organizations.

Book preview

Part One – How Human Brains Work

.

Chapter 1. Our Stone Age Brains

Life from 10,000BC to 1787

William Allman, in his book, The Stone Age Present (3), explains that modern human brains, in the years 500BC, or 1787, or 2024, are essentially no different from the brains of our Stone Age ancestors who lived 300,000 years ago. His analysis is based on observations from the study of evolution, that show how long evolution takes to make changes to life forms.

Turning the clock back 2 million years to the dawn of upright walking humans, the human brain slowly emerged from primate brains that were adapted for survival on the Savannas and jungles of Africa. Humanoid brains continued to develop in that environment for almost 2 million years.

Modern human (homo sapiens) skulls that would hold a modern sized and shaped brain appeared about 300,000 years ago. Compared to the 4.5 billion year age of planet earth, if you view the time history of earth as a 24-hour day, that would mean humans have only been here for the last minute and 17 seconds. It took about 3.6 billion years after the first appearance of life forms for human characteristics to develop. The point is, the pace of evolutionary change is generally very slow.

When humans migrated into Europe and Asia only 70,000 years ago, their environment was still one of small bands of hunter-gatherers. Scientists call them Neanderthals. They were the first Stone Age people, and the first humans to exhibit human consciousness behaviors like art and small clan cultures. They also produced complex tools, even if they were made with only stone tips.

12,000 years ago, however, a radical change occurred in human technology. Irrigation based agriculture and large multi-story villages became common. What allowed such a change in human society has been partially explained by many different competing ideas. (It will be in ch. 2) This technology explosion in ancient western society continued unabated through the end of the Roman Empire. It included things like: water wheels, pile drivers, cranes, water pumps, Hero’s steam turbine, stone roads from Rome to England, massive water aqueducts, full suit armor for Roman troops, war ships almost as large as modern ships, catapult artillery, and breathtaking architecture like the Greek Cities and Rome’s Coliseum.

While many people think the technologies of the 17th and 18th century industrial revolution were newly invented at that time, that isn’t the case. They were mostly refinements of machines made 1,500 years before. Extensive study of the technology of ancient Egypt, Persia, Greece, Rome and the Arab countries suggests that they had much greater technical ability than modern western education is either aware of or has told us. The knowledge they had was largely lost to European society during the "Christian Dark Ages". The term Christian Dark Ages is used here instead of simply the Dark Ages to make it clear that it was only Europe, under control of the Roman Catholic Church, that suffered the drastic loss of technical knowledge during the time period from around 480 – 1500AD. The technical achievements of the Greeks and Romans continued to advance in Persia, Africa, India and China during that period. And China, running on its own distinct time table, had many advanced technologies of its own, some far advanced over European discoveries.

As amazing as these achievements of the industrial revolution are to contemplate, they lead to a very sobering observation. The brain power needed to invent these technologies was not common among the population. Most people were not mentally different from their Stone Age predecessors. They were fast learners and could implement and improve on concepts they were taught. But they were still Stone Age thinkers. Only a very small number of people provided the advanced, intuitively creative thinking needed to explain all of the technology advances.

Now, advance the clock forward to 1787, the year of the creation of the U.S. Constitution. We would find that the everyday living environment of most humans outside of cities and royal palaces had not significantly changed from the agrarian environment and thinking from 13,787 years earlier, with the exception of replacing stone tools with iron ones. In 1787, ‘long distance’ communication was still done using paper delivered by horses. Discussions could take months for a letter to go from Maine to Virginia, or from England to Rome, and a reply to return. Canals, bridges, and castles were built using horses as the primary power tool, just as it was in Babylonian times. Travel used coaches pulled by horses. Crossing the ocean in wind-powered sailing ships would take more than 5 weeks, no faster than the speed of Babylonian sailing ships.

The average person was a farmer. They were relatively independent and reasonably self-sufficient. Families produced most of their own food, clothes and many tools. Whatever they needed that they couldn’t make themselves, they got primarily from local suppliers who also made one-at-a-time items by hand. They paid by direct bartering and could observe how the goods were being made. Most important, the technology of most of the items they interacted with was very simple. It was within the ability of their Stone Age brains to understand it as it probably would have been to their ancient Stone Age ancestors if they observed it. Because they could understand the technology of the items they used, they could often fix implements themselves if something went wrong.

The social structure of 1787 rural society was also very simple. Most people understood the lives of most of the people around them because they were basically the same as their own. They had rituals that explained the seasons, when the rain came, when to plant, when to harvest etc. A Stone Age brain was able to understand all of this. Even though stone tools became bronze, then iron, the simplicity of life persisted around the world until the industrial revolution restructured society during the 1800s.

Clearly, the human brain in the time period of the early cultures – e.g. Babylonia, Greece, Rome - was at least as capable as it was in Europe or America in 1787, given the technologies they had at the time. It also implies that Stone Age humans were just as smart as we are now given the environment they experienced.

.

Technology and Complexity

The industrial revolution was one of the outcomes of western society’s Age of Enlightenment (4). This revolution would explosively develop two concepts, already apparent in the ancient world, that would radically change human society: power tools and the specialization of labor. During the 200 years from 1787 through 1987, due to new freedoms from religious rule, European society was completely transformed. Most of the lost knowledge of Rome and its earlier predecessors, that was lost during the Christian Dark Ages, was slowly recovered through contact with Arab cultures that retained it. Additional new technology was brought in from China.

What began as an agrarian culture at the start of the industrial revolution was rapidly changed. The general public rapidly adopted new cultures evolving out of industrial communities due to advanced communications and automated manufacturing. This transformation continued unabated through the appearance of the Internet. That is, in just 250 years, human society went from the horse and buggy to space craft; from writing letters carried by horses to Skyping with people on the other side of the planet; from pushing plows to automated machines that harvest and process food right in the field, and factory machines that build almost every gadget used in our homes with minimal human labor. We went from a barter society to Internet purchasing, Internet banking, and high-tech intensive medicine.

These examples bring us to the critical observation for this chapter. All of this happened in a time frame that evolutionary driven brain changes could neither have: 1. contributed to, nor 2. adapted to. That means, because humans essentially still have Stone Age brains, as Allman explained, we are trying to process all the new knowledge of our time with the same Stone Age brains! This much change in such a short time, without commensurate brain changes, could not occur without causing major disruptions with profound implications!

In every country on earth, we now have thousands of complex products that most people use, but can neither understand nor repair. We are driven by ceaseless commercial advertising to fill our homes with every convenience. Rather than these bringing us more free time, we are consumed with new complications they bring along with them. They are plagued by flawed operation and cannot be easily fixed when they breakdown. Even when they run well, operating them requires a bookshelf of hundred-page long user manuals, which we don’t have time to read and can’t understand even if we did. We use automobiles, each with the power of hundreds of horses, on roadway networks that can take us everywhere. Yet, due to grid-lock, we often only move at speeds that horses could easily exceed. We watch TV news that shows instant coverage of events going on around the planet. Yet, we have no idea how we, personally, are even involved with most of it.

Most disturbing has been the modern advances in electronic communications, transportation, medical instruments and medicines. This is especially the case for the development of birth control and life extension protocols. These changes have radically altered the basic flow of evolution and the 3.6 billion year balance that emerged from the life-driving principle of survival of the fittest! During that entire period, the term fittest generally meant physically strongest. This principle has now been shattered and replaced by new factors that follow random chance and social status. The problem is, the new factors don’t match the world’s general view of human virtues.

It would be easy to add a hundred other social changes like this to the list. But where has it led? We have been pushed into life styles where both adults have to work almost as long as our cave dwelling ancestors, just to stay financially solvent. Our children are torn away from the traditional family to follow their own careers across the planet. And yet, tragically, we all live in a state of constant HIGH STRESS!

The point is, Stone Age human brains are not able to constructively deal with this new complexity because relevant inherited behaviors do not instantly develop as part of the brain’s formative evolutionary process. To cope, modern brains essentially respond by going into psychological breakdown. Stated more precisely:

To allow people to get through everyday life, their brains go into denial by continually inventing superstitious simplifications and inaccurate rationalizations that are manageable using our ancient evolved thinking.

.

Social complexity and family values

The invasion of our lives by complex technology is easy to see. What is more difficult to see is how it flows into and dominates all of our social interactions. For example, consider the concept of family values. Most people believe that family values are morally ordained, strong and constant. For most of us, however, the entire structure of family life has abruptly changed from what it was only a few generations ago.

250 years ago, on a typical day in early America, when you woke up in your little house on the prairie, your social interactions were primarily with your family and the farm animals. Every once in a while, you might go into town, do some shopping, attend a prayer meeting, and talk to some neighbors. But the interactions were pretty simple. You were farmers. They were farmers. There weren’t many variations other than perhaps a teacher, the store keeper, a pastor, and a doctor if the town was of sufficient size. The weather was your primary concern. You had kids. The neighbors had kids. The kids sometimes went to school. But eventually, they also worked on the same farm they grew up on.

Those days and that society are long gone (at least in advanced countries). We no longer live in a society where a family is defined as a man and woman, their children, maybe some grandparents, living and working on a farm together under an umbrella called marriage. In 2024, divorce is common. Children, if you have any, are away most of the day at school or activities. You rarely live and work on a family farm. Your environment is a multi-story stone building shared with many families. When you get up, you turn on TV while you use a medicine cabinet full of chemicals and gadgets to put on makeup and a costume for work. You check your iPad and smart phone to see what’s going on. Your farm now covers the entire planet.

The people you interact with will seldom be limited to your birth family. It typically includes dozens of people from dozens of nationalities and cultures. You are pulled into their daily lives, but also into their politics, their wars, their famines, their family problems – every part of their lives. If a school bus crash occurs in another state, you hear about it while the incident is still happening. You are brought into the tragedy of the lives of the families involved. If a forest burns on the other side of the world, you see the crisis, intimately, as it unfolds and hear the hardship it brings from those right in it. If there’s a drought, you’re there. If a plane crashes, you’re there. If there are riots somewhere, you’re there. Every day you will see soldiers and civilians dying in front of your eyes.

What makes all of these events a crisis for the human brain is that you are not just a casual observer. Electronic visual and audio communications equipment has spread everywhere. There are now more than 3 billion smart phone users! This is almost half of all humans. Almost every household in the world has both a television and a radio. Every car has a radio. These bombard you directly, and intensely. To a Stone Age Brain, it is hard to perceive that you are not involved. The talking machine, which you continually confuse with a real person, will make you feel you have responsibilities for what is happening and what you are doing about it.

Every day, elections will be in process. You will be asked to pick political leaders from a group of people you never heard of until a short time ago. They will tell you what they think about all the social issues you were just thrown into that morning. But, they will all have different views and give you different explanations.

The bottom line: all of this is about you having to make choices. Every day, in every part of your life, you will be forced to make choices among hundreds of issues. Many will be critical to your well-being. Our Stone Age human brains have not evolved behaviors to deal with this that lead you to a peaceful mental state.

We are told to view our environment as a new "normal. But how can it be any kind of normal if our brains have no familiarity with it? Yes, we all live on the same planet. Most in western society get up, wash our faces, put on our clothes, get something to eat, go to school or go to our jobs. But, do our brains view this as normal? How could that be when even the task of commuting to our jobs is outside our evolutionary experience? Across the globe, we experience this same task in very different ways. Flight attendants, for example, often commute to work by flying between cities! In our agrarian days, only 200 years ago, things were very different. Wasn’t that a life more like what 2 million years of evolution would call normal"? Yes, it was. But we are in denial about that.

The world one person sees is only the smallest fraction of the world everyone else sees. The shear complexity of life makes it impossible for any two people to go through life and have even close to the same experiences. The days when you were a shepherd, because your father was a shepherd, because his father was a shepherd; or a farmer’s wife because your mother was a farmer’s wife etc. are long gone.

NORMAL IS GONE! There is no way to even visualize a new normal until humanity finally builds a sustainable society.

OK. Let’s get your day going. Grab something to eat. Every food item you touch has social messages all over its packaging. How many calories can you eat? Are you a little heavy? A little anorexic? Who is your weight even important to? Your boss? Your customers? The office people who are on some new diet craze? Your Tiktok network? Your school mates? Did you pick a cereal with low enough mono and polyunsaturated fats? What about all those vitamins? Did making this food hurt the environment? Is the container recyclable? Is the manufacturer donating profits to a good cause? How do they treat their workers? Are they concerned about your health or your kid’s health? What are they trying to sell to the kids in the advertising on the box?

You finish up your yogurt and fruit smoothie. What are you going to do with the blender cup? Throw it in the dish washer? What about the water shortage? What about the additives in your detergent?

OK. OK. Let’s get out the door. Kids in the car. Off to day care? Your daughter came home with flea bites yesterday. What social situation will this bring up when you talk to the teacher? This is the first time you’ve seen armed police at the school. Are you going to say anything? Back in the car. Head out to the highway. The highway has turned into a parking lot. You’re going to be late for your appointment. Who’s fault is that? A message pops up on your dashboard and screams at you MAINTENANCE REQUIRED! Come on! Not now! What did I do to deserve this?

You do understand how to manage ALL of the details about all of these items and social interactions I just presented, right?

NO! It’s not right. Let me restate why this is significant: our Stone Age brains have not evolved mechanisms to automatically deal with the level of complexity that an out-of-control society is trying to force on us. And, why don’t people see and acknowledge this inability? Denial, a psychological defense mechanism developed by the brain long-long ago, to ward off a mental breakdown. The problem is, denial simply just ignores the details that are important to managing what is going on. This is not tolerable in a high technology world where precise and exactly timed interactions are required to keep us alive and safe. The result is, things fall apart. And when they do, the foul-ups pile up at computer generated speed.

Education to the rescue

When the question comes up challenging the ability of our Stone Age brains to deal with modern complexity, the typical defense is that Education will solve the problem. Whatever people need to know, they will be taught in school. The overwhelming denial in this answer can be shown with a simple example from medical schools.

Currently, to become a doctor, the typical training (in the U.S.) is for a student to first complete 4 years of regular college, then attend medical school for 4 years, followed by 2 or 3 years of residency training (apprenticeship) at a university hospital. While that seems like it should be a long enough training time, let’s look at just one small part of that training: treating diseases.

This excludes things like: learning human anatomy, body functions, surgery, legal issues, patient management, emergency medicine, etc. To learn about infectious diseases, current medical textbooks cover over 12,000 individual diseases. To treat those diseases, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration had approved over 55,000 drugs! No medical student can even read the available information about all of these. And these numbers are the tip of the iceberg. Just reading about each disease and each drug doesn’t begin to address what happens when a patient has more than one disease at the same time, or when drugs interact, that produce confusing symptoms or effects. The point is, every part of medicine is just as complex.

What does this example say for education in general? Every professional subject also has similar complexity: law, accounting, engineering, management, etc. At the primary school through undergraduate levels, the complexity can be similar. Take a subject that might seem simple: art. A quick look online just for drawing tools will produce catalogs hundreds of pages long just for pens and pencils!

.

Visualizing the Problem

As an assumption, let’s accept that we all have brain limitations that prevent us from understanding the world to the level of detail that is needed to fully navigate it. To be safe in life, shouldn’t we at least be able to understand it well enough, at a superficial level, to make good strategic decisions? One would hope so. But again, this is not as simple as it first appears. To make high level decisions, we first have to be able to visualize an issue in a way that portrays it in a way that the right decision appears obvious. How would our brain do that? As will be discussed in detail later, what our brains will try to do is draw on past memories and select those related to similar issues that we experienced before that were resolved with positive