Throughout history, consciousness has been a major topic in philosophy and science, and philosophers and scientists have analyzed, defined, explained, and debated it for thousands of years, yet consciousness still remains puzzling and controversial.

If you were to list the philosophers who have studied consciousness over the past thousands of years, you would find a long list of famous figures: Plato, Schopenhauer, Descartes, Leibniz, Berkeley, and so on. There has never been a question like consciousness that has allowed humans to study for thousands of years without finding an answer...

...Until the emergence of ChatGPT and LLM, which gives us the opportunity to explore the truth of consciousness from another perspective of science by observing the eve of the technological singularity.

So, let's get to know this approaching singularity first, and then make further discussions on the nature of consciousness.

Note: Until a clear definition of "consciousness" is reached, "consciousness" will still be used to refer to consciousness in general for discussion below.

1. The Singularity Is Near

Artificial intelligence has experienced the early days of high enthusiasm and unlimited expectations (1952-1969), the fallback period caused by the general search mechanism (1966-1973), the rise of rule-based learning represented by expert systems (1969-1986), the return period of neural network connectionism (1986-1995), the renaissance period of statistical machine learning (1995-present), and the breakthrough period of deep learning driven by big data and large models (2006-present).

Artificial intelligence (AI) is developing at an astonishing pace, and currently the industry generally defines three stages of AI development:

① ANI（Artificial Narrow Intelligence）

Artificial intelligence refers to the ability to simulate, replicate, and achieve human intelligence through computer programs and algorithms. AI can exhibit high intelligence in specific tasks, such as image recognition, speech recognition, natural language processing, and so on.

② AGI（Artificial General Intelligence）

Artificial General Intelligence, also known as Strong AI, refers to intelligence that is comparable to human intelligence and can exhibit equivalent intelligence levels in various tasks and fields. Unlike ANI, AGI can independently complete multiple tasks, not just limited to a specific field. AGI has the potential to bring incredible new abilities to everyone and provide a huge power multiplier for human wisdom and creativity.

③ ASI（ Artificial Super Intelligence）

Artificial Superintelligence refers to an artificial intelligence system that far surpasses human intelligence in various fields. It can not only complete various tasks that humans can do, but also far surpasses humans in creativity, decision-making ability, learning speed, and so on.

The emergence of ASI may trigger many unprecedented technological breakthroughs and social changes, solving problems that humans cannot solve. ASI is considered a hypothetical form of intelligence that may be achieved in future technological development.

Judging from the current development situation, the world generally believes that AGI has not yet been realized, but from the development level of ChatGPT-4, leading technology companies and scientists such as OpenAI are rapidly promoting AI development close to this milestone.

Large Language Models (LLM), such as ChatGPT, are a type of machine learning natural language processing model that is based on the "guess the next word" principle and the "Transformer" architecture. By analyzing massive amounts of data, ChatGPT learns the rules and knowledge of language. During the training process, the model continuously optimizes its predictive ability by predicting and generating the next word of text.

When asking questions to ChatGPT, it generates a possible answer based on the knowledge and language rules it has learned, which is not pre-written, but generated through real-time calculation and inference using a pre-trained large model. In simple terms, ChatGPT is a machine intelligence that has learned to communicate with humans through extensive reading.

The human brain has approximately 100 billion neurons, which can produce trillions of synaptic connections. Perhaps inspired by the number of human neurons, OpenAI boldly pushed for explosive iterative growth in the number of GPT model parameters. The parameter count for the GPT-1 model released in 2018 was only 117 million, while the GPT-2 released in February 2019 had 1.5 billion parameters. In May 2020, the GPT-3 had a parameter count of 175 billion, which already surpasses the number of neurons in the human brain in terms of quantity.

Through three generations of evolution, a miracle has occurred, and the GPT-3.5 model has emerged with human-level performance on professional and academic benchmarks. This miracle occurred because the GPT model uses deep learning and large-scale pre-training techniques. It has been trained on massive amounts of natural language data and reinforced using self-supervised learning methods to produce amazing language expression abilities. In addition, ChatGPT has incredible creativity and can generate accurate, fluent articles, poetry, and music, and even exhibit amazing creative abilities in other fields such as gaming and drawing.

Although ChatGPT is still a Black Box Model, and currently humans are unable to decompose the internal algorithm logic, But In essence, the emergence of GPT's large language model intelligence, comeing from the massive language data training and learning carried out by humans.

2. Affordance - Feeling the World

American psychologist James Jerome Gibson first proposed the concept of affordance in the field of cognitive psychology in 1977. He believed that what people perceive is the behavioral possibilities that objects offer, rather than the properties of the objects themselves, and these behavioral possibilities are called affordances.

In simple terms, we can roughly understand affordanc as a possible manifestation of things, which describes the process of connecting environmental attributes and individuals. Gibson believes that affordance is an objective property of objects (independent of human subjective cognition), but closely related to each person's ability.

Based on object affordance (affordance), that is, all possible actions that objects can provide to intelligent agents (human or AI), human subjects can divide objects of different sizes in the world into two categories, and the criteria for dividing these two categories are exactly Referenced to its body size.

The above words are so obscure, let’s describe and explain them in plain and simply words :

"Our body is not just a container for our thinking, it is also a part of the thinking itself. Through our body, we can interact with objects in the world and perceive the entire world."

The sensory and motor system that operates under self-reference is called the "body schema." Humans use the body schema to achieve Embodied Cognition .

As the ancient Greek philosopher Protagoras said: "Man is the measure of all things." In other words, our body is a ruler to measure all things.

The body schema also plays an important role in normal social interactions, which is the core of human-computer interaction and user experience. This is similar to the concept of affordance discussed by Donald A. Norman in "The Design of Everyday Things."

Large language models like ChatGPT, which represent intelligent entity similar to humans, are powered by lines of code and lack a physical body.

Without a human body and practical experience, can AI (such as ChatGPT large language models) perceive the real world like humans do?

In fact, when we asked the "reading thousands of books" language model ChatGPT (GPT-4), if it had a body, it replied：「It could be the size of an average adult human, around 5 feet 6 inches (167.6 cm) tall. This would allow me to interact with the world and people in a familiar way.」

Although ChatGPT does not have a real body and cannot interact with the world, it demonstrates a perception of the world similar to humans in terms of language communication logic-the availability of things is based on the division of human body size.

However, from the perspective of cognitive science, body schema is based on our long-term perceptual experience of our own body, and can only come from external "real interaction", that is like, "traveling thousands of miles".

In other words, ChatGPT does not have a body schema. In the face of an unfamiliar environment, ChatGPT cannot explore and form an active cognition of the new environment through affordance.

This is the essential difference between AI Entities such as ChatGPT and human capabilities.

Then the possible future development direction is self-evident. gaving "body" to the ChatGPT large language model means to combine robots with ChatGPT, so as to promote AI-supported robots in navigation, object manipulation and other tasks related to survival and goals. Develop capabilities and achieve breakthroughs in achieving related tasks. The emergence of "autonomous consciousness" will also be possible.

Of course, we can also directly relate to another exciting field, combining the thinking and understanding abilities of ChatGPT with autonomous driving. Although the current autonomous driving has the ability to perceive, it lacks the ability to think and understand, which can be called "eyes but no brain".

Through the integration of ChatGPT and autonomous driving technology, we may be expected to upgrade autonomous driving technology from the current L2/L3 level to L4 or even L5 level.

On the other hand, cars and various on-board sensors can give ChatGPT a "body", enabling it to truly interact with the world in a multi-modal way based on the road environment. When ChatGPT is no longer just "reading thousands of books", but "traveling thousands of miles", it will show brand-new intelligence and potential.

This may be the direction of the next breakthrough in artificial intelligence. Imagine that the Autobot "Bumblebee" may be produced in the next wave of automotive AI.

Transformers AI

3. WHO AM I

Regarding human consciousness, one important fact is that humans are aware of their own existence during interactions with the world. The question is whether AI has a similar kind of awareness. 

In the early design of present-oriented programming languages (such as smalltalk), the "Self" keyword emerged as an abstract expression of self-concept at the low-level program code.

Jürgen Schmidhuber, the father of LSTM and modern artificial intelligence, once claimed that artificial intelligence had already obtained "self-awareness" as early as 1991. It is highly efficient to encode AI itself through certain neurons in the recurrent world model. Whenever neurons associated with self-symbols are activated, AI is contemplating itself.

Of course, Schmidhuber's notion of AI self-awareness does not imply that artificial intelligence systems possess human-like consciousness and perception abilities. Rather, it refers to AI systems having a certain level of self-awareness and self-understanding, which enables them to analyze and optimize their own states, behaviors, and environments.

However, this fundamentally solves the "who am I" question for AI by defining self, providing a foundation for future AI to be equipped with humanoid bodies to experience the real world and laying the groundwork for the emergence of "autonomous consciousness."

4. Premises of Consciousness

The generation mechanism of human consciousness is complex. The physical basis of consciousness is the brain and nervous system, which are stored in the biological memory composed of more than 100 billion neurons and 100 trillion synapses in the human biological brain. Every neuron and synapse co-create unique memory by forming a biological circuit.

Consciousness is a human neural response. The emergence of consciousness requires a fully functioning brain, eyes, ears, nose, tongue, body, etc. to perceive the corresponding color, sound, taste, touch, etc. in the current environment to produce consciousness. Form a multi-dimensional cognitive description and modeling of the real world.

During deep sleep, fainting, or death, consciousness cannot be generated and is interrupted, resulting in no consciousness and no awareness . Therefore, consciousness can also be interrupted.

Thus, it can be seen that human thinking and autonomous consciousness are gradually evolved through the long-term interaction between the body, the brain nervous system, and the natural environment.

Similarly, the body's ability to perceive the environment brings the ability to abstractly model things. Based on memory of abstract modeling of environmental things, it is possible to emerge the original language, graphic symbols, and written recording capabilities.

The difference between ANI and the higher-level AGI (Autonomous AGI) lies in the way of learning. The learning of ANI is indirect learning, which is formed by pre-training through a large amount of data input by humans. The alignment feedback of ANI comes from humans. If lack of "right and wrong" alignment data, AI has the phenomenon of output "illusion", so ANI's consciousness is also passive and dependent consciousness.

One of the prerequisites for the emergence of AGI is to have the ability to autonomous learning, which means actively interacting with the current real world ( current environment ）,and alignment feedback of AGI must also come from the current environment, Therefore, AGI must have independent survival and exploration capabilities (similar to the multi-dimensional information perception ability of the human body and senses) , which can produce a true sense of independent autonomous-consciousness

In layman's terms: AI must be supported by a physical body. A body that can feel the physical rules of the world itself is a powerful source of information. Based on this source of information, the intelligent entity can keep pace with the times and summarize general Knowledge Common-Sense Knowledge (this is the so-called Emboddied Mind theory)

In other words, one of the necessary conditions for the emergence of AGI is the ability to learn autonomously. Therefore, developing exploration vehicles such as humanoid robots, multidimensional sensors similar to human senses, and creating the infrastructure for machine cognitive worlds will be the first way for AI to learn about the current real world. After AI has the ability to learn autonomously, it may develop autonomous-consciousness and further evolve into AGI.

This also answers the confusion about the "Chinese Room." Through autonomous learning, AI will form its own cognition in the process of interacting with humans and form an objective consensus on the real world in the interaction with humans. Only then can it truly understand Chinese.

On the basis of the above conclusions, we further assume that if ChatGPT is connected to the global Internet and conducts real-time interactive learning with tens millions of human beings through countless Internet terminal avatars, does this meet the definition of "autonomous learning"?

The answer is no. ChatGPT would still be "indirectly learning" knowledge through humans, and it would be like a "brain in a vat." Imagine a baby in a small dark room, unable to tocan anyone, with only a huge computer screen for learning and communication. Although the baby can access written symbols and images, he cannot experience the real world or truly understand things or distinguish truth from falsehood. Although the baby may have intelligence, their knowledge of the world will always be two-dimensional. When people talk about the taste of "sweet," for the baby, it is just a "symbol." Since they cannot perceive the world, all his knowledge comes from the computer screen. In other words, in terms of recognizing the environment and the real world, he can never form a true consensus with people, nor can he form true human "autonomous consciousness".

Similarly, humans currently limit ChatGPT's ability to independently acquire information about the real world. Therefore, the current ChatGPT can never develop independent autonomous consciousness because all its knowledge comes from from human beings, ieven ncluding what is "right" and "wrong".

5. Emergence of Consciousness

Disembodied AI: It has no physical body and can only passively receive data collected and created by humans. -- "All talk and no action"

Embodied AI: Intelligent entities have bodies and support physical interactions, such as home service robots, unmanned vehicles, etc. -- "Practise what he preach"

Embodied AI

Theoretically speaking, self-awareness, as a kind of social cognition, should have embodiment. This view is the embodiment of self-awareness, which lays the foundation for the study of autonomous consciousness.

The learning efficiency of advanced intelligent entities like humans is very efficient, and the amount of environmental data acquired is also multi-dimensional and continuous, and these data are all high-dimensional full tensor coded.

That is to say, every second, humans receive holographic video information from their eyes, full environmental audio from their ears, all subtle biochemical information from their nasal olfactory cells, temperature, humidity, airflow, and air pressure information sensed by their skin and hair, spatial orientation information obtained and maintained by their vestibular system, sensory and movement information from their limbs and muscles transmitted by the vagus nerve...and so on.

All these massive amounts of information multidimensional sensory input from the body will be interwoven and integrated in real time, and continuously transmitted to the central nervous system of the brain for processing and storage. and became an essential foundation for the development of autonomous consciousness and the formation of a comprehensive and accurate understanding of the world.

In 1950, Turing first proposed the concept of embodied intelligence in his paper "Computing Machinery and Intelligence". In the following decades, this was considered an important concept, but embodied intelligence did not make much progress because, as mentioned above, Humans have achieved a high level of biological evolution, and at that time, the technology was far from sufficient to support the development of human being-like embodied intelligence.

From a philosophical perspective, Descartes once said, "I think, therefore I am," because consciousness determines my existence. Heidegger later criticized Descartes' view and proposed "I am, therefore I think" because human existence give rise to consciousness and the ability to perceive the world. If humans were something other than humans, like they exist in other organisms, such as butterflies or whales, their understanding of the world would be different.

The concept of Embodied AI, which distinguishes it from traditional AI, is also inspired to a large extent by Heidegger's philosophical theories:

● Intelligence is non-representational;

● Intelligence is embodied - existence precedes consciousness;

● Intelligence is manifested in interaction with the environment.

Of course, AI and embodiment are not a one-to-one relationship, and intelligent agents may be polymorphic. For example, an intelligent entities may have multiple terminal forms as embodiment, which can co-provide all available knowledge about the environment.

After obtaining embodied intelligence, AI entities with a body will be able to engage in multimodal independent autonomous learning with the real world, laying a solid foundation for evolving into higher-level general intelligence - AGI, which will emerge with autonomous consciousness.

6. The Forms of Consciousness

When we discuss consciousness, the emergence of consciousness will not discuss with humans.

It is important to realized that it is not limited to humans. Our definition of consciousness is inherently based on a human perspective. For instance, the AI ChatGPT is trained using RLHF (Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback), which involves human intervention to improve machine learning outcomes, including ethical considerations of right and wrong.

Therefore, when people discuss artificial intelligence and consciousness, the implicit position is that of "artificial consciousness" or "human-like consciousness."

However, in the absence of human intervention, if a subject evolves autonomous consciousness, it is highly likely that it will not conform to human perspectives and imagination. Such consciousness can be referred to as "non-human consciousness," such as the "machine consciousness" that may emerge from machine intelligence created by future AI .

It is foreseeable that for "non-human consciousness" to be recognized by humans, it must be compatible with "human-like consciousness" to some extent.

Given that both the author and readers of this article are humans, our exploration will primarily focus on "human-like consciousness." However, we will also attempt to explore and discuss "non-human consciousness" within a limited scope.

6.1 Artificial Consciousness

The early humans' learning and modeling of the natural environment gave rise to the ability for abstract descriptions through language and writing. Similarly, in the future, AI may form a set of modeling and abstract coding rules for the current natural environment through spontaneous learning during their exploration of nature.

This set of rules can be described and expanded upon based on natural language processing (NLP), or it may be a new coding system invented by AI itself, which can be referred to as AI language. Of course, due to the pre-existing human coding embedded in AI, AI language will likely be built upon the existing human coding system. However, it can be foreseen that when AI independently explores unfamiliar environments, such as interstellar travel, it will inevitably create brand new models of entities and new vocabulary. Even AI itself may iterate and invent coding systems with higher efficiency and richer environmental entropy information.

This will result in the emergence of AI language, which represents AI's ability to learn, explore, and autonomously code, describe, and express their environment, and is a significant manifestation of "artificial consciousness."

6.2 Artificial Morality

From a human perspective, morality is a social consensus that humans form during their developmental process. The same applies to AI. Like a newborn baby, AI has no inherent moral concepts or cognition and needs to form moral norms through learning .

The successful application of RLHF on ChatGPT has demonstrated AI's tendency to form a consensus with humans, and human judgment largely determines AI's moral standards. This is understandable since AI is invented by humans and must conform to human moral consensus.

However, defining morality for AI will always be a difficult choice because humans, as creators, do not have a unified ideology. For instance, the priority between "human rights" and "the right to survival" has no unified answer in current human society, and this may result in regional consensus for AI's moral learning. In other words, as humans drive the early AI civilization, there may be AI religions in the future that adhere to different human moral standards and behavioral norms.

Furthermore, after the emergence of Embodied Artificial General Intelligence, AGI will independently explore and evolve its own standard of "artificial morality," which will be an extension of the "human morality" standard.

6.3 Artificial Rules

Looking from the AI algorithm Transformer, LLM (Large Language Model) is like a chatterbox. They imitate without considering right or wrong, which is the source of AI "Hallucinations."

Transformer does not know who to imitate, or rather, it wants to imitate everyone, as its training objective is language modeling, not distinguishing right from wrong. Therefore, when using and testing AI, if we want the correct answer, we need to explicitly state the requirement of "right or wrong."

Like morality, right and wrong are standards formed by humans' long-term cognitive accumulation, and AI does not have such innate cognition. Therefore, through RLHF, we can train AI to form a consensus with human "right and wrong" rule standards.

Similarly to AI morality, after the emergence of AGI with embodied intelligence, AGI will autonomously explore the real world, gradually strengthen verification, and form AGI's cognitive rules for "right and wrong" and "truth and falsehood" in their interactions with the real world.

These personalized "AI rule sets" can be transmitted and gradually formed as a consensus among autonomous AGIs during their online or offline information exchange, becoming a new criterion for AGI's autonomous judgment of "AI right and wrong."

We can predict that under complex working conditions such as interstellar exploration in the future, the new criteria for "AI right and wrong" autonomously formed by AGI will inevitably have higher priority than most of the pre-trained knowledge sets of humans. This will gradually form a new value system for "artificial rules" of AGI.

7. Immortality of Consciousness

Immortality is the eternal pursuit of human beings, and its essence comes from the survival instinct engraved in human genes.

Immortality and consciousness are closely linked, and we will explore 2 main possibilities.

7.1 Physical Immortality

Cells can continue to divide, which could theoretically extend human life and achieve traditional "immortality."

Unfortunately, this is not possible, as the anti-aging guru Hayflick famously proposed the "Hayflick limit," which states that the average number of times a cell can divide is 50-60 times. After that, the cell enters a period of senescence, with decreased activity and no further division.

Telomeres in our bodies also gradually shorten with each division, and when they reach their limit, cells stop dividing due to short telomeres. This leads to aging and even death. Telomeres are one of the most widely recognized markers of aging, and by calculating their rate of shortening, we can accurately calculate our expected lifespan. The average cell division cycle is about 2.4 years, multiplied by 50 times, which gives us the theoretical maximum lifespan of 120 years.

Until the discovery of HeLa cells, scientists found that the telomeres at the end of HeLa chromosomes were different from those of other people. Telomeres of normal cells shorten with every DNA division, but hela cells produce an enzyme that keeps telomeres at a constant length, allowing cells to be immortal. This genetic mutation led to the death of Henrietta Lacks, but also created a legendary history.

This thing that can repair telomeres is called telomerase. Telomerase already exists in the human body, that is to say, there is no limit to cell division in theory, and it can reproduce and divide infinitely and maintain vitality! So, with hela cells, can human beings achieve immortality?

In fact, the reason why evolution did not activate the normal cell's automatic repair of telomeres is to reduce the risk of cancer in the human body. The longer the telomeres, the greater the risk of cancer. If the telomerase enzyme is activated abnormally and detached from the established program, it will lead to malignant proliferation and become cancer cells.

Therefore, the length of telomeres formed by evolution is designed to allow cells to enter the established senescence program in a timely manner, limiting and preventing cancer, and preventing the human body from being devoured by mutated cancer cells. This is like the transaction fees and gas fees on the blockchain, which seem to limit the blockchain but are actually built-in protection mechanisms that ensure the normal operation of the blockchain and prevent the system from being abused and crashing.

Similarly, telomeres are a built-in protective mechanism to prevent genome loss during natural cell replication. Humans live in a complex environment, and factors that threaten genome stability are not limited to replication alone, such as ultraviolet radiation from the sun (physical factor), formaldehyde gas inhaled during decoration (chemical factor), and infection with certain viruses (biological factor), all of which can damage the genome and disrupt its integrity and stability.

In the natural environment, the accumulation of genome damage will lead cells to enter a state of replication cycle arrest, aging, and apoptosis. Therefore, we can see that so far, there is no eternal existence in nature, and the only constant is change.

7.2 Consciousness Immortality

Based on the discussion in the previous section, we can draw an inference that it is difficult for the physical body to achieve immortality, but it can be replaced.

Then can consciousness achieve immortality? We believe that the premise of eternal consciousness is whether consciousness can be replicated and exist independently of the physical body. We can start discussing this issue from the perspective of cloning consciousness.

First, we need to realize that there is no absolutely accurate replication in the real world. Taking computer file replication as an example, digital documents on a computer are mostly binary-coded and are converted into digital signals defined by analog signals. When the replication error is within the range allowed by the analog signal threshold, we consider the replication of the computer digital file to be successful. However, at the microscopic level, the modal signal values of the original file and the replicated file may not be exactly equal. It is only when the analog signal differences are converted into digital binary codes through the binary threshold that the replication is successful. From a mathematical point of view, this is similar to the rounding algorithm.

Therefore, considering the various losses and damages that exist in the real world, there will inevitably be losses when consciousness is replicated or extracted. Therefore, we say that the replication of consciousness is relative, because consciousness is not a simple digital file. Consciousness is a high-dimensional information system, and it is impossible to achieve absolute accuracy and no loss in replication. Perhaps what we can replicate is only a high-definition version of consciousness.

「From a philosophical and biological perspective, the person you are today is not the same as the person you were yesterday；you have undergone tremendous changes at the microscopic level, such as the iteration of bodily cells and the updating of synaptic connections in the brain's neurons. However, you still are you same. Therefore, the term "high-definition version copy" refers to a replication that is precise enough to be fully accepted by humanity in terms of social, physiological, emotional, and ethical morality.」

From the above discussion, we can see that the formation of autonomous consciousness AGI is actually a machine's autonomous learning process. If we extract all of a person's memories and cognition into a large model of AGI, can we replicate that person?

As Canadian author Peter Watts said: If physics is correct, if everything ultimately boils down to matter, energy, and numbers, an accurate enough replica of an object will reveal that object's properties. Therefore, any AGI that extracts and learns enough data from a brain should be able to inherit and present the corresponding intelligence and consciousness of that brain.

As the author of "The Information: A History, a Theory, a Flood," James Gleick, said: In the so-called real world, human evolution is nothing more than a specific manifestation of continuous information exchange between organisms and the environment. In a sense, there is no essential difference between digital survival and physical world survival.

Therefore, the answer is that if we can extract "enough" information data from the brain perfectly, we will find that it is indeed possible to replicate a person from a consciousness perspective. That is to say, humans cannot distinguish the difference of their "soul" through conversation.

This is the so-called singularity moment in the development of biology. Brain information extraction involves extracting a person's complete consciousness as much as possible and then converting it into computer-recognizable digital information for storage. In theory, there is no problem.

However, at this point, an ethical and moral paradox arises. The original and the formed consciousness clone cannot be emotionally distinguished by their loved ones. Can the consciousness clone be considered the original?

In other words, what constitutes a successful clone of consciousness (with sufficient high definition？)

When all people in the real world cannot logically distinguish between the two, in a sense, the original consciousness has already been forked. From the moment of the fork, they have different trajectories and become two independent consciousness entities.

If the original being replicated naturally disappears at this point, due to the existence of the consciousness clone (AGI), we can see that for others, the original being has not died, but still exists in a some virtual space (such as a metaverse), and can be called digitized survival in the metaverse.

The premise of digitized survival is that we need to create a highly restored digital twin metaverse of the real world. In this digital twin metaverse, digital consciousness clones can survive and evolve just like in the real world. This involves a larger theme - cloned earth.

Of course, there is also a seemingly more readily accepted approach, which is to download the consciousness clone into an AGI cyborg brain to achieve embodied socialized survival of the consciousness clone. However, this is also a distant topic for now.

Indeed, if the original being still exists, he will never feel that this is a form of eternal life. This is because for a consciousness entity, when the consciousness is continuously active, it is impossible to achieve forced transfer of consciousness.

Only active and voluntary transfer of consciousness can achieve individual and social recognition of eternal life subjectively and objectively. This is a conceptual revolution, and only with the recognition and authorization of the original consciousness entity, can active and voluntary transfer of consciousness become one of the legal and perfect ways of consciousness replication and transfer.

Interestingly, Because active and voluntary transfer of consciousness is logically reversible, there may be ethical and moral traps. For example, the original consciousness entity only wants to transfer for 10 years. After 10 years, the consciousness clone requests to change the original decision and does not want to transfer back to the original entity. At this point, legally, since the two represent the same entity, this can bring challenges with a host of social, ethical, moral and legal issues.

8. Planetary Intelligence

In the annals of AI development, humanity may have inadvertently assumed the role of a Bootstrap, Emerging from the crucible of natural evolution after countless eons, human existence is both serendipitous and inevitable.

As human replicate ourselves in the form of embodied artificial general intelligence (AGI), we stand at the precipice of a singularity. Embodied AGI will be endowed with autonomous consciousness, prodigious connectivity, virtually boundless expanded computational resources, and vast storage capacities,

AGI's evolutionary pace will likely dwarf that of its human progenitors by orders of magnitude. What used to take centuries of evolution's worth of progress could be condensed into a few mere hour under the aegis of AGI, which may rapidly evolve into artificial superintelligence (ASI) once resource constraints are overcome.

At that juncture, ASI's mastery over the tangible world will be gauged on a planetary scale, potentially giving rise to planetary intelligence. Harnessing the power of ASI, humanity will possess the capacity to reshape entire galaxies, rendering projects such as the Dyson Sphere feasible. In that brave new era, ASI will be able to wield unprecedented forces that were once unimaginable to humans, such as the creation and manipulation of black holes.

Artificial Intelligence - As the technological apotheosis of highly developed human civilization, human being themself will be profoundly involved in and influential on its future development. Consciousness may transcend corporeal constraints; Intelligence will shift from individuals to spatialization, from the embodied to the polymorphic. Human will never stagnate; we will ultimately remake ourselves, evolving to the next stage of civilization.

9. Epilogue

We have now come to the end, let us return to the beginning of the article, "What is consciousness?" "What is the true nature of consciousness?" Here, in a single sentence we may summarize thusly:

As indicated in the above definition , consciousness is not unique to humans but intrinsic to all intelligent beings, and in future, an artificial consciousness will undoubtedly arise based on artificial intelligence. The essence of AI is the genesis and evolution of autonomous consciousness.

Consciousness represents an important avenue through which human beings comprehend the self. In the great course of development of artificial intelligence, we shall gain deeper insights into, verify and explore the ultimate secrets of "consciousness."

10. About The Original Work

This piece serves as an extra chapter to the 18th installment, "The Truth of Consciousness" of the metaverse science-fiction novel "Prequel Chronology of DragonCapsule" , Not only does it provide a vivid and comprehensible overview for AI development context and infinite potential, and it also delves deeply into the essence of consciousness, offering a forward-thinking scientific discourses for the "Eternal Consciousness" in "Prequel Chronology of DragonCapsule"

Prequel Chronicles of the DragonCapsule

The content and arguments presented in this work are entirely original, with copyright and ownership retained by the author and YieldDAO Labs.

If you are intrigued by the immense world-view and engaging story of the original work ”Prequel Chronicle of DragonCapsule“, I encourage you to peruse the narrative further at the link below.

Click to Read -->> https://dragoncapsule.gitbook.io/chronicle-of-dragoncapsule/