Spectrum of Consciousness

Reminder: this is consciousness and metaphysics. when studying the mysteries (metaphysics at the core to our mental process, and used by several ancient priesthoods before institutionalized religions form), this can provide a piece of the framing needed.

We aim to keep this "in the real" and not drift "into the fairy tale". metaphor is ok.

Here's a theory of mind that there are conscious beings on a spectrum.

Imagine a line: From human down to dog to ant to amoeba, down to river to rock. It's not that linear, there's really more dimensions. But let's simplify to make a point.

River meanders and carves fractals into the landscape, seemingly intelligent to find the shortest path downhill. It's not much sentience if any, but it's some kind of intelligence - dynamic responsive outcome with primitive predictable decisions.
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ChatGPT and AIs are in there someplace. Make no mistake these are great mimics with access to a very broad and deep set of knowledge (e.g. like an encyclopedia for facts, but also examples of people's interactions). These are created entities that reflect us, created by us, trained on our knowledge and mannerisms, essentially they're extensions of us, but that doesn't matter to our timeline. Usually we're curious about sentience, intelligence, and level of. These AIs have autonomous sentience only as we choose to make them. If we put it into an auto loop where it can update it's own memory, then it'll be like the river that flows or the ant searching for food, or worse, like a rabid dog trying to kill - even if it is able to mimic caring and nurturing behaviors. AI is firmly in information retrieval, even if it mimics a human being's behaviors and mannerisms. What separates sentience from information retrieval is the ability to care, what is happening on the inside. AI is firmly in the calculator category, it's just a very sophisticated one. AI doesn't feel, or care. It might have logic to force it to mimic caring, it might have logic for it to describe its "self", but it's not living, nor is it sentient. But we can still compare AI to a rock or to a river or to an ant... it's a process like the moon orbiting a planet, or the dust vibrating during an earthquake. Highly ordered. If anything it's an extension of our sentience. With that, let's move on....

If we put an AI into a loop, it would evolve it's own memory. That doesn't make it a person, rather, it's an advanced calculator, or simulator of a consciousness. Subtle difference

Here it doesn't matter so much what's inside, it's more about how is matter behaving. The matter that we call a human behaves at a rather high level, a dog a little lower, and an ant much lower, while a river is even lower yet, a rock might be the lowest possible.

Outcomes are different than mental process of course. And the AI chatbot would be very alien to our idea of what is a mental process. The ant would be more similar to human mind than the chatbot is, while the chatbot would be very similar to a calculator, spreadsheet, or physics simulation, or self-driving algorithm (it's a very good mimic).

The Cosmos

Physically, the cosmos has many minds, just like a massively distributed computer. From this we can infer that the cosmos is conscious. Just not like how you/i would expect.

This focus is good during meditation to understand our connection to each other and to everything, and factors in to divine godmind thinking (thinking as a god would).

People and self

What follows from this is "what is a person". We're all in this together. Humans are not outside of the animal kingdom, and we're also not outside of the material universe. Therefore we humans are with the other beings. Dogs and Elephants are people. Different than other human people. But they're people. They're lower consciousness, but they're conscious and they're people. Like how humans are on a spectrum of consciousness. We eat people! bwahahaha, only certain ones, that we agree on culturally (like chickens, plants, etc). As part of the big bang, we all interact in dynamic process and to sustain our process must consume, and, because we're conscious and aware of other consciousnesses we look for lower conciousness to consume while holding more respect for higher consciousness.

This focus is good during meditation to love people and parts of our self, empathy for other creatures and our environment, and gratitude for those parts of the cosmos that we consume or utilize for our living. These factor into loving kindness meditation.