ABSTRACT
The quest to decrypt consciousness has increasingly getting a lot of attention in numerous scientific fields. Many are facing the hard problem of consciousness, in which most theories do not agree among each other. From within physics, different theories are posed that are consistently in conflict with theories from other fields like biology, psychology, phenomenology, cognitive neuroscience, metaphysics, quantum mechanics and so on. Even the existence of consciousness itself is actually uncertain. The importance of not just getting an insight of what it might be, but rather getting a deeper understanding of what it really is, is becoming more urgent in a world where AI and Machine Learning are rapidly changing the way technology is infusing everyone’s daily life. Are we opening the box of Pandora by developing these technologies, as increasingly has been warned by prominent figures of the tech industry, or could this technology solve the bigger problems humanity is facing with, like climate change. What if we accidentally develop technology which manifests signs of consciousness, and how to deal with this. These and a plethora of other questions are becoming so crucial to address that a neutral zone of research and experimentation is required, free from commercial incentives and unbiased within science. Within the territories of Postmedia art, this could take place. This paper will explore and present a new study the author proposed to commence at the City University of Hong Kong at the SCM starting in September 2019.
Key points of research
- The human – technology relations in post media art.
- Imperfections as value of projecting mechanisms for human self personification.
- Cooperative autonomous artificial objects, their artificial neural networks projecting communication conflicts and incongruities, and the possibilities and importance of their applicability in post media art.
- The connecting bridge between the physical realm and the digital realm in both physical art installations and VR.
- Algorithmic decision making and artificial creativity based on a solution projected through limited technical applicability and limiting range/scope, produced with limited resources, and resulting in autonomous artificial sculptural entities.
- Experimental artistic practice as the driving force of formulating research hypotheses generating research data.
- Proposing the art practice as a neutral field to connect different scientific research disciplines in a collaborative network of knowledge based interests and knowledge generation.
Introduction
Technology is increasingly and exponentially affecting our human existence as we have known it for millennia. Both hype and fear concerning the newly emerging technologies are present in the popular media, especially concerning the dangers of Artificial Intelligence (AI). Most of these technologies are developed by large monopolizing corporations (Hayase, 2018), where commercial business incentives increasingly lead to a capitalist desensitizing level of applicability, which consequently concentrates enormous amounts of power in the hands of a few. This kind of imbalance reduces the potential of employing the new and often controversial technologies in a more humane way, in order to help solve important issues such as climate change, growing energy demands and clean solutions, job insecurity due to robotic automatization, and global pollution. This research proposes a different approach. Through postmedia1 art (Quaranta, 2011) production and research, using in tandem artificial intelligence (AI), Machine Learning (ML), Deep Learning (DL) and Artificial Neural Networks (ANN), the non-commercial aspects and potentials of these technologies could be unambiguous and unbiased, being researched and explored in an independent and unconstrained manner. The inception of a cross-disciplinary network of scientists and researchers from different disciplines will be commenced, intended to provide valuable insights for the newly developed concepts tested in postmedia art installations. The gathered data will form the foundation for a new theoretical model addressing the human – technology relations. A selection of the following issues will be tested and if deemed relevant further analyzed: technological personification, perceived artificial consciousness, the connection between the physical material realm and the virtual digital world, algorithmic decision making in relation to the perception of artificial life, artificial creativity, emotional affection through technological exposure, technical / mechanical clumsiness as a tool for human self-personification and self-reflection, and ultimately the quest to provide insight in the possibilities and probabilities of developing, or discovering artificial consciousness in postmedia art.
The Hard Problem of Consciousness
Robert Lanza and Bob Berman proposed the controversial theory of Biocentrism (Lanza and Berman, 2010, 2017), in which they redefine physics by switching its perspective to biology. In quantum physics, a barrier had been hit revealing numerous impossibilities, as was first described by Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle in 1927 (Heisenberg, 2007, pp. 86–90). Lanza uses this principle to formulate contradictory phenomena in quantum mechanics by readdressing these incongruities through the spectrum of biology. Further, it can be noted that, after so many years of research of consciousness, it has never led to any plausible scientific explanation, and might remain in obscurity forever (Mørch, 2017). Information in the fields of physics and quantum mechanics are conflicting each other, thus stalling a unified theory of everything. Because of an obsolete paradigm as it has once been formulated by Einstein through his theory of relativity, which according to Lanza is incompatible with the quantum theory, (Lanza and Berman, 2010, pp. 7,14, 47–50) biocentrism is one possible different approach. The theory departs from the classic assumption that billions of years of physical processes generated life and consequently through a development of behavioral adaptive processes, known as habituation (DeLanda, 2015, chap. 6) gradually developed into consciousness, also known as physicalism or materialism (Mørch, 2017). Lanza proposes an inversion of this system and presumes that consciousness itself creates and generates the world and, consequently, the universe and all matter, thereby questioning human and animal life, which traditionally are positioned at the apex of existence, but not in a manner as it has been proposed by thinkers like Levi R. Bryant, Bruno Latour, Timothy Morton, and Graham Harman. Bryant for instance, diverts the focus from the Anthropocene to an object2 oriented ontological existence where consciousness, awareness, perception and cognition is omnipresent in all beings, animate or inanimate (Bryant, 2014, p. 64). He dismisses the classical Kantian human self-imposed alpha position, the ultimate evolutionary culmination of existence, by deflecting consciousness to all matter, also known as panpsychism (Sheldrake, 2001, pp. 105–108) In a theory of new materialism spearheaded by theoreticians like Manuel DeLanda, Rosy Braidotti, Karen Barad, Elizabeth Grosz, Jane Bennett and Vicky Kirby, who all shared ideas with posthumanism, in which a repositioning of ‘the human’ in relation to ‘nonhuman actants’ was suggested. Thereby acknowledging and even strongly implying a new materialist existence of nonhuman entities. Similar ideas were differently interpreted by Quentin Meillassoux, combining an approach that would focus more on aspects that are ontological, epistemological, and ethical. Even though slightly dissimilar, it was as well classified as new materialism, although more used as speculative materialism (Dolphijn and Tuin, 2013, pp. 15–16). This novel way of thinking was caught on by Timothy Morton, who proposed hyperobjects, i.e. systems which are too complex or out of scale for the human mind to fully grasp, influence or control. Hyperobject can refer to things that are massively distributed in time and space relative to humans. These can vary widely from black holes and biosphere to the solar system, but also from the human manufactured plastics that have very long lasting effect on the environment to a more abstract concept of capitalism, or the sum of all the nuclear materials on earth. Complex systems such as the environment, the universe, and the climate are also considered hyperobjects, and so is the internet as well as consciousness. According to Morton, hyperobjects are directly posing numerous threats to individualism, nationalism, ant-intellectualism, racism, speciesism, anthropocentrism, and possibly capitalism (Morton, 2013, pp. 11–21). This is in extension of what Graham Hardan and Levy R. Bryant were already addressing in their earlier theory of Speculative Realism (Bryant et al., 2011, pp. 4–7). Consciousness thus became allocated to all species and matter, rather than being exclusively allotted to humans, as had been previously accepted. Of course visionary pioneers like Alfred North Whitehead, ahead of everybody, already addressed the problems in classical concepts of reality though a criticism of the sciences of his time, in which he explicates with a critical note to his contemporaries that cosmology cannot be described as irreducible brute matter. Instead he suggests that changes are fundamental and inevitable, concluding that all things flow, exemplified by works of poetry. (Whitehead, 1997, pp. 18-20,86-88) Matter in his view became non-solid and in a constant state of flux, laying the foundation of conceptualizing matter as information rather than substance. Consequently navigating other thinkers to take a different avenue which surely influenced people like Maurice Merlau-Ponty, who were expanding on ideas about consciousness as they were developed earlier by people like Edmund Husserl and other phenomenological thinkers. However these philosophers from an earlier order of reasoning still considered consciousness as a principal internal process, inherent on organic organisms and in particular humans, which they researched through observations, experiences and by analyzing and differentiating phenomena. The idea that consciousness could be something outside our enclosed corporeal existence had not been made yet. Graham Hardan made a good argument that undermines the importance of experiences as they were deemed an essential component of forming consciousness. He emphasized that some objects of experience do not really exist, like dreams, hallucinations or delusions manifested by our anxieties (Harman, 2018, p. 155).
Since the first ideas about consciousness were explored, a plethora of different interpretations and ideas were posed and a chance of a unified theory of consciousness progressively dwindled. Thus the problem of consciousness, became considered as a hard problem, as no one came up with a persuasive theory of consciousness acceptable by various schools of thought. Opinions among scientists from a wide range of disciplines about what consciousness really is and how it originated differ significantly (Tegmark, 2015). Traditionally, it is assumed that physics describes the hardware of the universe, the concrete matter, but increasingly this notion is challenged by what physics is telling us. Its descriptive language has more in common with software, a logical and mathematical structure. As a solution to the antiquated and somehow obsolete hard problem of matter, the software would require some kind of hardware to be implemented in. To date, physicists have reverse-engineered the algorithms or, more specifically, the source code of the universe, but left out their concrete implementations. Contradictions of how matter can be both particle-like and wave-like have puzzled physicists. Consequential questions only deepened that confusion, and would suggest that the hard problem of matter is structural, but this would contradict the essence of matter which suggest that solidity is just the behavior of resisting intrusions and spacial overlap by other particles either wave-like or particle-like. A conundrum that physics could not solve. More research would only result in new structure, but not approach even close a plausible explanation of this paradoxical phenomenon. New concepts to tackle this issue have been posed, which suggests that consciousness, in its most basal form, is the hardware that the software, described by physics, is run on. Therefore, the physical world could be interpreted as a structure of conscious experiences (Mørch, 2017). This brings us back to Lanza’s controversial theory, which might after all not be so farfetched. Arguably, things might get even more complex, murky and more peculiar when we include new technologies that would ultimately lead to a form of artificial consciousness. Furthermore, when merging the human species and technologies we are developing become more ubiquitous in an array of applications that automatically turn us into cyborgs, the boundaries between organic and artificial consciousness are further blurred, as it has been explored through science fiction, while the newly generated artificial entities might even develop more humaneness as humans posses (Guga, 2015, p. 134). Even though it might stay in the realm of science fiction, such a vision does not seem impossible, implausible or unreachable in the upcoming future, so it should certainly be taken into consideration. Foundations of traditional theories of what consciousness is will increasingly start to fail due to the probability that consciousness may arise through the development of artificial entities. It could have a detrimental effect on and undermine religious believes, scientific theories, and ultimately our own world view and self perception, thus providing a novel ground to embrace theories like object oriented ontology or biocentrism, regardless of how arbitrary they may seem at the moment.
Consciousness in Works of Art
When works of art gain a capacity of haptic, auditive and visual sensing, comparative with a low level sentience, but refrained of the notion of self, become interactive, and start responding autonomously to their environment in a human-like manner, could we explain this as a rudimentary form of intelligence and, if so, is there any consciousness developed (A. D. Maslic, 2016)? This question becomes more challenging if the artworks are equipped with complex artificial neural networks (ANN) capable of machine learning (ML) or even, in a further stage of development through deep learning (DL) as part of a system of artificial intelligence (AI), and exist in both the physical material realm and the digital virtual realm. Subsequently, when such works of art gain a capacity to learn, interpret, and adjust their reactions and behaviors, which are important properties of human and animal existence, can we then assume that these properties will bring the works of art closer to artificial life? This way of thinking certainly requires a change of mindset, as it re-elucidates the demarcated definitions of what life is. According to philosophers in the domain of Object Oriented Ontology (OOO)3, it is ineluctable to presume that everything is imbued with consciousness and even with a form of self-awareness, which might make it tempting to jump to conclusions that, through their material form, artworks possess a level of consciousness and self-awareness. This line of thinking has of course been criticized by many philosophers among others Slavoj Žižek (Žižek, 2016, pp. 177–192), James Barrat (Barrat, 2015, pp. 39–40) and many scientists working in the fields of physics and quantum mechanics, considering that their knowledge territories are being sabotaged. A more nuanced and realistic view of the possible dangers and potentialities of Human-level Artificial General Intelligence (AGI), defined as the ability to accomplish any cognitive task as well as humans, has been extensively researched by Max Tegmark (Tegmark, 2018, pp. 54–59), although it does contradict the phenomenon of artificial consciousness. According to Tegmark, consciousness equals subjective experiences, which makes it almost impossible to discern it in intelligent artificial entities (Tegmark, 2018, pp. 360–361). By arguing this Tegmark does not depart from a phenomenological conceptualization of what consciousness really is, even though he is researching this in relation to new technology. Also, historian Yuval Noah Harari observes and conceptualizes artificial intelligence (AI) through a different contextual analysis. He explains that the ownership of technology, and specifically artificial intelligence, will increasingly work as a tool of power, which in a capitalist organized and structured world cannot be denied. It will remove the drama of human decision making, and consequently take away liberties and human self-conception as an important component of the society, thus leaving the humans struggling with a sense of irrelevance. He also states that it is unlikely for artificial intelligence to develop consciousness as it becomes more intelligent, but refrains of compelling argumentation to support his claim (Harari, 2018, chap. 18). Even more interesting is that this, however, is impossible to argue, considering the scientific lack of understanding of the origins of consciousness. The real difficulty of addressing consciousness in works of art is the impossibility of measuring consciousness, especially when science still does not have a clear or unambiguous answer of what consciousness itself is (Metzinger, 2004, chap. 1). Given the complexities behind the characterization of consciousness, artistic research offers an extraordinary opportunity to explore these nebulous realms at the boundaries of science by developing unconventional methods of both artistic production and art-infused research. Putting aside the restrictive objections of improbability, I propose observing this issue through a different vista, i.e. through researching the audience’s experience of artworks, which raises the question of whether this mirroring of the mind can reveal a deeper meaning while indirectly reflecting the works of art, which are communicating complex concepts and mimicking forms of consciousness and self-awareness. This could be achieved by giving properties of vision, auditory sense, interactivity, haptic qualities, autonomous decision making capacities, and a form through which the audiences can project personification on the basis of anthropomorphism (A. D. Maslic, 2016). Another question is, could artworks reflect our own consciousness through such constructed notion of artificial conscious entities? It is not necessary to develop conscious technology, like metacognition (Kanai, 2017) to measure the audience’s perception of conscious technologies, as it is a path to alternatively explore the elusive boundaries of consciousness through artistic research. By researching audience perceptions and reactions on objects, artworks imbued with projected simulated or rather mimicked consciousness and conscious like behavioral properties, a mirrored latent reflection of our own consciousness can be researched and analyzed through observations and in-depth interviews with spectators in confrontations with these interactive objects or artworks. The visitors who have been exposed initially by prehension to these, both informed and not informed, will become important generators of data to the study, that subsequently could instigate new strategies of formulation, interpretation, conceptualization and ultimately cognition, that would lead to deeper insights in this elusive realm.
Hypotheses
- Audiences will be able to personify with and perceive sculptural objects as presumed living entities when those objects demonstrate full responsiveness to their environment, display auditive and visual capacities, make autonomous decisions, and interact with visitors in a human-like behavior and manner.
- Artworks will reflect our own consciousness if they behave in a seemingly and synthetically induced intelligent manner, thereby mimicking consciousness.
- The level of self projection will increase if the objects have intentional mechanical and algorithmic flaws included, mimicking a form of artificial clumsiness, i.e. technological imperfections.
- Artificial clumsiness will be internally experienced and recognized by audiences as human imperfection, and subsequently comically, which will lower the threshold of projecting a sense of artificial life onto the object.
- Audiences will project consciousness upon these objects when being interactively engaged with them in virtual reality (VR).
- The threshold to experience mimicked consciousness will be more acceptable in virtual reality (VR), as it provides an isolated and more immersive environment in a virtual space of simulated hyperreality.
Interactivity and Perception
The use of Game Engines and Micro Controllers provides an opportunity to let coding run the physical art objects by processing information through sets of algorithmic commands, letting them simultaneously exist in both the virtual and physical domain. Providing these works with visual and auditive capacity and equipping them with different sensors, cameras, and microphones, will allow them to operate in a habitat of interactivity and responsiveness to their environment. In essence, they will display a synthetic mimicked awareness of their direct surroundings, so they can detect change, and directly respond to them through the given algorithms in a similar way simple organic bacterial species might do. Further development of the artworks will include equipping them with decision making properties through machine learning (ML) and artificial intelligence (AI), making them less predictable, and enabling them to start a life on their own, figuratively speaking. They will gain the quality of developing, through a simple form of autonomous learning, a simple but autonomous mind (Bostrom, 2016, chap. 10). Concealing how the decision making process is achieved will mystify these inorganic mechanically produced objects and the will, arguably, be perceived by audiences as a simple artificial life form. Such a “mystification” process, along with intentionally projected mechanical and algorithmic randomized flaws that are translated in motoric clumsiness, will further elevate the possibilities of reflecting the inscape of audiences. Each person is directly aware of one’s own shortcomings and flaws. Through the process of anthropomophization and self-recognition, the audiences can easily relate and project personification to these works of art. As observed through earlier exhibitions (Maslic, 2017; T. Maslic, 2016), these implementations lower the accessibility threshold, provoke smiles and even laughter among audiences, thus opening a platform for further research of an individually experienced, introvert form of elusive humor in post media art. The aspect of emotional interactivity invites the audiences unobtrusively rather than artificially directing them to start playing with the artworks. For this reason, emotional interactivity is an important aspect of involving and subsequently engaging audiences by respecting their free will and their personal comfort space (Her, 2014). The aspects of game and play are equally important triggers of audience’s fascination, exploration, experimentation, and, ultimately, education (Huizinga, 2014, chap. 8). The overall intention is to provide the audience with introspective insights through playfulness and lightness, which are the result of carefully constructed and developed concepts. They embed deeper meanings based on a dialectical approach, which contrasts playfulness with the philosophical nature of the work and, consequently, lower the accessibility threshold. An aspect of gamification of the artworks can contribute to their interactive functionality. Another question that needs to be addressed is that of the fully immersive VR environments which provide a different experience of reality. Is it possible to create a form of responsiveness and intelligence in VR that can be experienced as a form of virtual artificial consciousness? The questions of how audiences will cope with such interactions will be worth pursuing in further research of this project as a follow-up study.
In conclusion
This paper has been written primary to present roughly the research topic of the author. Simultaneously it functions as an invitation to look at the relation technology is permeating through society, the arts, politics, design disciplines, and everything else that unquestionably will impact each and anyone of us. It remains unlikely that we will soon discover a satisfying answer on the hard problem of consciousness or that we will develop a unified interdisciplinary agreeable theory of what consciousness really is. Paramount is to keep on researching, while closely monitoring corporate implementations of this technology in daily life. To really understand both the dangers and potentials of how these new technologies can be implemented, but also to provide theoretical feedback to keep track on the deeper mechanisms from where these technologies could change our individual behaviors, but also how they can potentially undermine our sociopolitical systems at large. Corporate ownership of these technologies will generate enormous power in the hands of a few, which will require urgent legislation and regulation, but this can also paralyze innovation and development. Paradoxical as it is, a balance need to be found how of who is owning and who is controlling these technologies. Exploring these technologies through the territories of various art disciplines in experimental environments, controlled and exposed, could not only reveal the immanent potentials of these technologies but could also reflect our own tendencies and internal inscapes providing a small door into the perception of into what consciousness might be, but maybe more interesting it might provide some insights in the ancient old quest to discover who we are, and where we are going and why.
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1Postmedia art is understood as a niche field extensively described by Domenico Quaranta, defined in his book titled: “Media, New Media, Postmedia” (Quaranta, 2010). He is laying claim of the discrepancy between the two fields of new media art and old media art that are focused on contrasting and conflicting paradigms. As is it is claimed by Lev Manovich as the impossibility to converge Duchamp-Land with Turing-Land, the contemporary arts consists of complex concepts and is content oriented contrasted with the new media art world which is oriented to state of the art computer technology rather than content (Manovich, 1996). Later he formulated a more nuanced criteria to distinguish post media art and postmedia aesthetics. Where he slightly depart from his previous statements and poses that postmedia as a digital medium which is not strictly based on data storage, but rather as a cultural object that structures users’s experiences of the generated data (Manovich, 2001). Quaranta is more refined in the precise description of postmedia art, and in brief it would encompass everything that does not categorize in new media art, but has overlapping fields with both contemporary art and new media art (Quaranta, 2011).
2The word ‘object’ here can be interpreted as a rejection of the dualistic ‘object-subject’ relationship as it was traditionally used in philosophy, where ‘subject’ refers generally to humans while ‘object’ to everything else. In Object Oriented Ontology, the importance of the ’subject’ is mitigated to neutralize the human position in its relationships with ‘object’, thus subject, equals object, and the hierarchy or dominant position of the human at the apex of existence has been removed, restoring thereby the balance between animate and inanimate beings or matter.
3Object Oriented Ontology (OOO), A term coined by Levi Bryant (Bryant, 2011, chap. 1), derived from concepts of Graham Harman’s doctoral thesis of 1999. Object Oriented Ontology is a metaphysical school of thought that rejects the privilege of human existence over the existence of non-human objects and contrasts the Kantian Anthropocentric position as it is focused in classic human centric thinking. Further it is critical to correlationism, it rejects undermining and overmining. It preserves the concepts of finitude. In later work of Bryant, and Harman, all matter became imbued with consciousness, which paved the way for a different mindset, as it is described in this PhD proposal. It influenced many philosophers and scientists, but has also been criticized as naive and nihilistic.