The Holy Grail of Consciousness Embedded AI
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About this event
In anticipation of the 32nd Science of Consciousness Conference being held in Arizona in April 2026 www.consciousness.arizona.edu and the offerings of the Institute of Noetic Sciences www.noetic.org/events-calendar including ongoing research we are urged to participate in www.noetic.org/science/participate-research/, we will be hosting 3 to 4 meetups in Toronto in the coming months on these interesting themes.
The first meetup on Dec 13th will focus on the two very different concepts of Consciousness itself.
The prevailing understanding among many Scientists is that burst of electrical activity is consciousness. And that it is conceivable, and indeed possible, to harness precisely this burst of electrical activity in silicon chips giving rise to conscious awareness in AI.
The above differs from the understandings reached by thinkers of the East who investigated states of Mind beyond dreamless sleep and made empirical observations of non-human living and non-living entities over millennia. Perhaps for the first time in the history of human thought they distinguished between the attribute-less Absolute and the notion of a Deity, God, in all religious thought. To them the Absolute, Pure Consciousness Ultimate Reality could not be explained by speech or understood by the Mind, for it is the illumination of Pure Consciousness which enables the speech to be expressed and the Mind to understand in the first place.
Deep thinkers in the West like Plank, Schrodinger, Schopenhauer, Bohm or Emerson, Thoreau, Whitman, or Tesla, Yeats, even former antagonists like Max Mueller to name a few acknowledged what H.H. the Dalai Lama refers to the Eastern concept of Consciousness as the East's greatest contribution to human thought. But understandably, with a few exceptions, Scientists of Eastern lineage are reticent with their peers for not being taken seriously or worst being labelled New Age sirens. And the ones who have access to and have understood the extensive rational thinking behind these concepts are anathema to the scientists for they do not even wear stitched clothing.
So it behooves the lay people to continue, with with a deep sense of humility, to encourage interactions between the proponents of the two divergent concepts of Consciousness to serve humanity better.
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