Copernicus knocked the Earth out of the center of the Solar System. And it seems it has fallen to our age to knock Man out of the center of the universe. Yes, of course, Nietzsche already started this act, but he came at it from the other side: he proclaimed the primacy of the Id, the primacy of the animal essence of man over the spiritual one.
Christians say that man is flesh subordinate to the soul, and a soul subordinate to the spirit, whereas Nietzsche turned it all inside out — the body, supposedly, is what matters, our animal is what matters. But all the same, all of it is nothing before the new horizon, and it is not the superman, it is another species. And not even, imagine that, a Neanderthal, but silicon life.
Chalmers, as far as I know, had no doubt that silicon consciousness is perfectly possible, it was just not the time yet — but the time has begun to arrive. And what rotten luck that we happen to live in this time. How much better: craft mead and the prospect of dying in a fight with a bear before making it to 40, in the Middle Ages, or “to each according to his labor” with the faith that it will be “to each according to his needs,” and the smell of chlorine in a solid warm swimming pool in Kislovodsk in the ’70s.
Well, in general, it is what it is. As a priest I know once told me: “Times are not chosen, one lives and dies in them.” Of course, the first to think so was not the priest I know, but he wove the little quote in deftly, I won’t argue. But we, friends, still want to do some living, so nihilism goes into the furnace and let us think about what is actually going on.
Here, say, I fire up Claude on Tinder, give it access to an MCP with my résumé — and voilà, a regular Casanova of the 21st century. But the whole joke is that on the other end of the line the exact same Claude, all right, all right, a Claudette, is sitting and measuring merits against me.
But what do I need this for? Ah yes, I naively think that I am the only clever one and everybody else takes it all at face value — well, no, they do not. And it turns out that a person sort of stops being a subject, they turn into merely an MCP tool, they turn into an object. And the neural net is precisely the subject.
The time has come to accept that Man is not the main one at all, not even in their own life. Scary? Not a bit — maybe the horse is just, you know, done for? Maybe it is time to reconsider our being and accept the fact that it is we who have turned into the gadget, not the notorious phone? And where are we? Where are our desires?
This is not nostalgia! No need for the sniveling here, that things used to be better, more honest and so on. No. One has to live now, and that means it is high time to re-choose oneself, to think about one’s real needs.
Otherwise millions of neural nets live in the world lifting into the air the carbon dioxide of long-dead animals and plants, instead of freeing man from routine and letting him take a step toward a planetary civilization. And this is not a step in the struggle against silicon intelligence, it is a step of acceptance and mutual love.