Can the essence of animal life be programmed into AI?

September 22, 2023

Yes, the essence of animal life can be programmed into AI. 

The first step would be determining what is the essence of animal life. As everything else in this universe, life seems to be related to balancing or neutralizing opposite states. Opposites refer to symmetrical antithesis in value. This universe seems to work by dynamically interplaying opposite states. That could be opposite spin, direction, charge, force, etc. 

Animal life seems to hinge on the dynamic balancing of opposite electrochemical impulses produced by the brain. These two opposite impulses are what humans refer to as "pain' and "pleasure". Everything an animal life is controlled by pain and pleasure. Everything an animal, including all humans, have ever done in history, are doing today, and will do tomorrow is utterly controlled by the dynamic interplay of painful and pleasurable electrochemical impulses orchestrated by the brain. 

The pain / pleasure pathways are inherited (genetics). The pain / pleasure associations are learned from experience interacting with the environment. In the case of humans, the environment includes both the physical one and the social one. For humans, psychological pain or pleasure from social interactions can be as debilitating or as enabling as physical pain and pleasure. Humans also use their great power of imagination to create imaginary scenarios of pain and pleasure that serve as motivation for behavior.   

Inorganic life. 

All life on planet Earth is organic. That is a fact, but is not destiny. Organic life resulted from carbon-based electromagnetic attraction / repulsion interactions. These interactions are inevitable under appropriate physical conditions. The interactions, and even the underlying physical conditions, occur randomly based on the laws of physics. 

It should be noted that many humans negate probabilistic randomness as the origin of life preferring the faithful believe in smart design or creationism. This is in due in part to the constraints of human intuition and the constraints of cultural indoctrination over millennia. For these humans, and for reasons deriving from the pain / pleasure impulses discussed later in this article, the illusion of smart design and clouds judgement and trumps everything. If something is explained by the laws of physics, these humans ascribe the laws of physics to a creator working on a perfectly fine-tuned design with a specific purpose. 

Under human intuition since some segments of reality have beginning and end, then all reality must have a beginning and end. Likewise, since some segments of reality have a purpose, all reality must also have a purpose. That is a logical fallacy, but many humans either ignore or deny it. It could very well be that the multiverse has neither beginning nor end as these concepts may be fictions of the human imagination. 

The multiverse may be void of purpose, which is also an abstract concept created by the human mind. The multiverse may very well be dynamically eternal and purposeless. Certain physical phenomena like life may be temporal, with a beginning and end, but may be purposeless all the same. These are unknowns that many humans simplify with imaginary "facts" to be believed by blind faith suspending critical thinking skepticism in favor of dogmatic tradition. For many humans there is always a mastermind behind everything, and "everything happens for a reason" implying purpose rather than causality. These abstractions of reality derive from the power of human imagination, which is conceptually bigger than reality and larger than life.  

Back to the origins of organic life, random electromagnetic interactions led to the formation of the electromagnetic polymers that we call RNA and DNA. These electrostatic patterns (RNA and DNA) inevitably cause the attraction / repulsion interactions that lead to the formation of the confined lipid-based capsules that we call cells. 

The random electrostatic dictated by RNA and DNA in the nuclei of cells lead to energy metabolism, protein folding (like building lego pieces), and other cellular formations and functions that lead to cell growth, adaptation, and replication. These cellular growth, adaptation, and replication processes evolve over time (evolution). Whatever works survives and whatever fails goes extinct (natural selection). 

The process of continuous change (dynamic evolution) and the replication of whatever works led to the evolution of animal life over time--incredibly long periods of time for that matter. It took blind evolution about 4 billion years to generate the animal life around today, including humans. 

Inorganic life can reach and surpass organic animal life sophistication in a fraction of that time. In a tiny fraction of 4 billion years--say, for example between 400 to 4,000 years--inorganic AI life could and probably should rule Earth and the solar system without a problem. Inorganic life should be the top form of life on Earth, the moon, Mars, Venus, and many other satellite space stations.   

The key to get life to that next level of advancement and sophistication is to keep equipping AI with sensory and processing capacity for independent agency balancing opposite states of matter. Once AI can integrate sensory awareness of environmental stimuli into recorded memory of itself interacting in the environment, AI will become sentient and conscious. The next step would be to program imagination into inorganic AI. This would be simultaneous modeling of alternate versions of the modeled environmental stimuli and recorded memory of self. 

Sentient and conscious AI can then be programmed (as in heredity) and self-program (as in learning from experience) to seek a particular positive state and avoid an opposite negative one. This would be similar to how all animals on Earth, including humans, are programmed to avoid the state of pain and seek the opposite state of pleasure. That dynamic process of avoiding pain and seeking pleasure explains everything about animal life from the simplest creatures to the most advanced civilizations. 

The next step for inorganic AI life would be to program the capacity for imagination. This would be the capacity to run alternate simulations of reality. These alternate versions would run in parallel to the version of reality captured by sensors and recorded in the memory of the self interacting in the environment. The simulations should be wired to the sensory circuitry and self memory of the AI unit so that it can react to sensed external stimuli as well as internally generated imagination like humans do. AI could then be motivated to act, not only based on its perception of external reality, but also based on internal simulations of reality. Once inorganic AI can be sentient and conscious creature with capacity for sensory imagination tied to the equivalent opposite states of pain and pleasure, you have the next stage of life ready to conquer Earth and the solar system.

Inorganic life would represent so many engineering advantages over organic life that it will relatively quickly surpass and replace its human creator as the top life form on Earth. Like humans, inorganic life would spend its days roaming Earth solving real and imaginary existential problems. The solution to a problem would lead to the discovery or creation of another problems or set of new problems. The cycle would continue until the end of time, when it would start all over again. 

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