That’s right. We need superintelligence to solve these problems that we don’t even understand. For such problems we might not even be able understand the very definition of it, not even talking about finding good solution.
Volodymyr Frolov
And no, consciousness is not a fundamental property of the universe.
Do you have any objective evidence supporting this claim?
If that’s just your assumption it would be helpful to clarify it in your essay, as the rest of your arguments follow from it.
That’s a valid observation, but my comment is about both of them (should we call them speculations at this point?)
For the sake of the argument, it doesn’t make any difference that we can’t write a computer program (BTW, can’t we? are you absolutely sure about theoretical impossibility of literature-detecting neural network?) to detect both. For literature we know that it is an emergent phenomenon and we have a solid understanding of what it means for some text to be considered a piece of literature, even though the exact boundaries of literature might be vague.
For literature not only we can point our finger to it but also we can give more precise definition. For consciousness we have no clue what it is. We suspect that consciousness in particular and personal identity in general might be just one type of qualia among many others; but then we have no clue what is qualia.
Consciousness could be an emergent phenomenon (like literature) or fundamental property of our universe. We don’t know and there’s no good reason to prefer one speculation over the other.
Consciousness, like literature, is a high level view that’s hard to pin down precisely, and is largely a matter of how we choose to define it.
It is worth noting that Consciousness is a phenomenon which needs an explanation we don’t have just yet. But it is still going to be the same phenomenon no matter how we choose to define it; the same way as it doesn’t matter how we chose to define wind or lightning for instance, it is still the same feature of nature. The only reasonable definition we can give it right now is to point our finger to it and say: “this is Consciousness”.
I tackle this question in details in my NoUML essay.
You can think of an abstraction as an indivisible atom, a dot on some bigger diagram that on its own has no inner structure. So abstractions have no internal structure but they are rather useful in terms of their relations to other abstractions. In your examples there are 4 outgoing composition arrows going from “brushTeeth” to 4 other abstractions: “prepareToothbrush”, “actuallyBrushTeeth”, “rinseMouth” and “cleanToothbrush” and 3 incoming generalization arrows going from “people”, “dogs” and “cats” abstractions to “animal”.
Now imagine you have this huge diagram with all the abstractions in your programming system and their relations to each other. Imagine also that “brushTeeth” and “animal” abstractions on this diagram are both unlabeled for some reason. You would be able to infer their names easily just by looking at how these anonymous abstractions relate to the rest of the universe.