There are some aspects of AI research that commonsense struggles to realize. Even among trained IT experts. Not because of a lack of information, education, or technical knowledge, but because we are still a species that doesn’t know itself. We tend to externalize our conscious awareness and miss the internal psychological and cognitive mechanisms that determine our cognition. We tend to study, analyze, and know everything out of us but know almost nothing about ourselves and how we know. This also is a consequence of a materialistic culture that—due to the enormous success of science, and which is the emperor of the third-person perspective—we envisage huge technological and material adventures that are supposed to lead us to a bright future and sci-fi society. But we can’t imagine any inner progress. We don’t even know what this could possibly mean. That’s why we don’t know how our cognitive processes work, and are so thrilled by all the AI hype and transhumanist dreams.
If we could…
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