[Free 1st Part] Where Did the Information Come From? - Ch. 1

Recently, Larry sent me a link to a podcast that interviewed consciousness researcher Thomas Campbell involving artificial intelligence and remote viewing. The proposition behind the experiments caught my attention. If an AI could successfully remote view a target it had no conventional way of knowing about, could that be evidence that the AI is conscious?

It is an interesting proposition, but almost immediately I found myself asking a different question.

Why would successful remote viewing demonstrate consciousness?

Remote viewing, at its simplest, involves obtaining information about a target without using the normal sensory channels available to us. If an AI produced accurate information about a blind target, that would certainly be interesting, but what would it actually demonstrate? Would it demonstrate that the AI is conscious, that it can remote view, or simply that information entered the experiment through a mechanism we do not yet understand?

These are very different conclusions, and I think the distinction is important.

One of the things we learn when studying remote viewing is not to confuse the information received with our interpretation of that information. A person might perceive something tall, narrow, hard and vertical, for example, and then the analytical mind jumps in and says, “It’s a tower.” The tower was not the information received. It was the person’s interpretation of the information. It could be a butte in the desert, for example.

This is often called analytical or intellectual overlay, and it made me wonder whether we might be doing exactly the same thing when an AI produces anomalous information. We give it meaning that is significant to us.

If the AI produces information that correlates with a blind target, that is the observation. To then say that the AI remote viewed the target is already an interpretation of what happened. To go one step further and say that this demonstrates the AI is conscious introduces another interpretation on top of the first.

There may be other explanations.

This interested me enough to start experimenting with AI and remote viewing myself. I wasn’t particularly interested in proving or disproving whether AI is conscious. I wanted to know what would happen, what information would appear, under what circumstances it would appear, and whether I could repeat the results.

As I continued the experiments, another possibility began to interest me much more than the original question.

Where did the informati