Artificial Intelligence and Consciousness

Does AI (Artificial Intelligence) have the capacity to become self-aware. Even if an AI could pass the Turing Test, so that those involved in the testing could not decide whether the subject of the test were human or not, this accomplishment would not prove self-awareness. Ultimately only a self can know that it is aware of itself. We presume that everyone else that we meet is self-aware. It's a reasonable working hypothesis and serves us well most of the time.

As presently conceived, AI in all its forms has a purely physical basis into which are embedded algorithms that allow it to make sense of inputs and respond to these in an appropriate manner. To be sure, AI is capable of extraordinary feats. AlphaZero for example, with no experience of playing either Chess or Go and knowing only the basic rules of these two games, managed to defeat all human opposition after playing a sufficient number of games against itself. However, no one would claim that AlphaZero was self-aware.

The idea of an astral body, also called a subtle body, as being the lifelong accompaniment of the physical body is not accepted by the scientific community. The common view is that somehow consciousness arises as a result of the physical body, in particular through processes in the human brain. Handicapped by this limitation, it's not surprising that the question is asked as to whether consciousness can arise from any purely physical construction. Once the reality of an astral body, acting as a precursor, organising agent and non-physical double of the physical body, is accepted then the answer to the previous question is an emphatic no.

The astral body in its turn arises from the mental "body", although body is perhaps not the best term to describe it. It is an "essence" that persists after the astral body from the previous incarnation has disintegrated. The astral body does not undergo sudden termination as does the physical body. It more or less fades away but the extracted essence constitutes the mental body. It is this body and its need to gather more experiences on the physical plane that produce firstly a new astral body and then a new physical body.

Without an accompanying astral body, any purely physical body can never be anything but an automaton. It does not matter if it is constructed from organic or non-organic materials or even if it is made from differentiated human cells that have been grown in a laboratory. Not even primitive consciousness, let alone self-awareness, can arise from it. If it were possible to connect a human brain to sensory inputs from a simulated human body, then this "organism" would remain self-aware as it was when it inhabited its former human body. The astral body would remain attached via the human brain. Such a feat is likely to be realised at some point in the future if humanity maintains its current rate of progress. Elon Musk is already onto it: Dawn of HUMAN-ROBOTS: Elon Musk to found new company to merge brains with AI.