People like to deal with issues in which they may not be fully competent.

I came across the article “GPT-apocalypse is canceled”, which once again made me think about why seemingly smart people sometimes do not see obvious things for other things. Let’s try to understand this issue.

If a person decides to take up a topic, then obviously there are emotional reasons for that. Normally, the motivation to do something is the pleasure from the very process of learning something new.

However, not always getting pleasure is the only internal motivation to do the same science. Any person has another type of motivation – a feeling of pain. More often than not, this pain is mental rather than physical. We don’t have many ways to deal with it. One of these methods is various psychological defense mechanisms, for example rationalization.

Rationalization – a mechanism of psychological defense, in which only that part of the perceived information is used in thinking, and only those conclusions are made, thanks to which one’s own behavior appears as well controlled and does not contradict objective circumstances.

It is known that people with different personality disorders prefer different activities. For example, most often schizoids are engaged in the sciences – mathematics or theoretical physics.

Is it possible, in the case of a schizoid disorder or accentuation, to say that the only reason for a person to do physics or mathematics is just to enjoy the process? (if anything, I don’t have a goal to offend schizoids, I myself am from your camp).

Surely many have noticed that people who have approximately the same knowledge and even the level of intelligence can, at the same time, take very different positions on certain issues. For example, one researcher may be conservative while another is liberal. What is the reason for this difference in their positions, if they have the same knowledge? After all, then, in theory, should be the same conclusions?

The conclusions will be different, because the conservative has a stronger fear of change due to larger tonsils. Therefore, even a conservative scientist can believe in some very implausible tales of state propaganda, and the whole “scientific method of cognition” turns out to be “down the drain.” But this article is not about the difference between liberals and conservatives. It is simply important to understand that our emotions play a much larger role than actual knowledge, and in fact determine how we see the world.

According to theories of predictive processing, unfortunately, we all live in a kind of “hallucination”, which is synchronized with the outside world when the discrepancy becomes significant. We cannot have an idea about reality itself, since we always deal only with its “simulation”, which our brain draws for us, having fragmentary ideas about the outside world.

If it is more convenient for us to live in a world where something is not, or vice versa, something is, then in principle there is no reason not to take this seductive step towards meeting illusions. And then a person with conservative views will have a different world, a different reality, compared to a liberal. Because one person needs to live in a reality that is more convenient for him on a particular topic, while another no longer needs it or needs it less.

And since no one tries to analyze himself, the reason for his actions and the reasons for the peculiarities of his perception, it means that there are no attempts to somehow get out of his own “matrix”, which means that there is no adequate perception of “reality” and a full-fledged conscious life. Hence the differences in opinion among people with the same level of knowledge and IQ.

The differences are due to the fact that people live in different “realities”, each has its own “hallucination”. But someone will still be closer to the truth, because many illusions are already drawn on top of “real” representations. And if there are no reasons in some new layers of illusions, then the perception will be more pure and adequate.

Closer to objectivity will be the person who needs less protection from experiences. After all, the point is not that we do not have the ability to perceive reality itself (yes, we do not, but this is not so important now). The bottom line is that when our brain already has some information about the outside world, then on top of this “objective” information, a reality more convenient for consciousness is drawn. There is a distortion of information that, in principle, could not be distorted. So we live in a multi-level “matrix” and subconsciously know where the truth is, and where we lied to ourselves.

In this regard, it is necessary to expand the scientific method of cognition, since it is necessary to take into account the fact that we all initially distort perception to please our experiences. And this distortion in practice will be very difficult to somehow detect and rethink.

Are there many people in the world who change their position during disputes? This almost never happens. How can this be explained? Here or everyone is right, which is impossible. Or just someone in a dispute does not want to say goodbye to their illusions. Because illusions are a mechanism for protecting the psyche from something unpleasant. Therefore, the solution to this issue, alas, lies not in the plane of disputes about physics or philosophy, but in the office of a psychotherapist.

No arguments will convince a person to change his position, if he is under some illusion on the matter, even if he is a man of science. And the point here is not that the arguments are not convincing enough. And just because it doesn’t work. A person will not be able to get out of the illusion that protects him from something extremely unpleasant until these experiences themselves are eliminated.

Now let’s move on to the main thing. If we all tend to go into illusions, then our worldview is most often nothing more than a pile of various “crutches” that help us get away from painful moments. Therefore, it very rarely happens that a person is simply interested in doing physics, just interested in the topic of artificial intelligence, just interested in science in itself. Unfortunately, most likely “not just interesting”, but it also plays the role of building some kind of illusion for escapism from painful moments.

The most paradoxical thing is that a person who is interested in science can at the same time have a real “magical thinking”. Rationality provides a powerful tool not only for understanding the world, but also for feeling like a “magician”, to whom the whole world is now clear, which means everything is under his control, everything is laid out on the shelves. This is the real feeling of pseudo-control over life. Such an illusion simply protects from anxiety, from the fear of death and from much more, just like a superstitious person. Therefore, such “magicians” rationalists can write a book about the methods of rational thinking in the magical world, what an irony.

Issues such as the structure of consciousness are emotionally significant, because somewhere near this topic are issues such as one’s own death. Therefore, it is difficult to be objective when talking about consciousness in AI. And it is especially difficult to be objective if you have devoted your life to this issue. Because it is very likely that a person did not just devote his life to this issue, but to avoid some internal contradictions.

If people who are passionate about AI will honestly say what came first: the desire to see something alive in the car, some kind of mind, or an objective assessment of such a possibility, then I think there will be a desire first. This means that everything else will be nothing more than an adjustment of logic to this desire. And no scientific method will help them see this, no knowledge, no experience of machine learning, etc. And all their philosophical conclusions will be nothing more than one big such beautiful “fairy tale”. But other people this tale is not interesting and not needed. They already need real grounds to consider something on this topic.

Therefore, if we take a person who has nothing to do with AI, then most likely, after reading the information, he will more adequately assess certain dangers from AI and more adequately answer philosophical questions about the same consciousness. Because he will simply be more adequate in his perception, which is much more important than knowledge and experience.