on art evolution ai and consciousness

would art exist if everything was perfect? let's imagine humans got their shit together and reached utopia. what would drive them to create art besides historical events or appreciating beauty. and by art i mean films, painting, games also.

that raises another question: does an art created by an ai have the same value as one created by a human. to answer this we have to consider a couple of things. first, does ai suffer, does ai criticize or hate itself. does an ai get angry when something it is working on doesn't turn out well, does it have a certain vision of something and works on it day and night to reach it and feels happy when it's done. people struggle and love and have, and although not in all cases, they create art that would eventually make them connect with others. they will use art as a way to share their emotions or a certain message and see how the audience reacts. why would anyone want to connect with an ai?

"as long as human beings exist they will instinctively strive to create. in a way, that's what binds them with their creator. and what is creation? what is the purpose of art? why does it exist? is it good or bad? is it something constructive, or just art for art's sake? but one thing is clear: art is prayer. that says it all. through art humankind expresses hope. everything else is irrelevant. all that which doesn't express hope and isn't built on a spiritual foundation has nothing to do with art." a. tarkovsky

one compelling example are philosophical zombies. those are beings that have a mind physically identical to a human one, but do not have conscious experience. on a biological level, human brains are also a very complicated neural network, so does that mean that at the end of the day philosophical zombies are also conscious?

we actually cannot answer that as the brutal truth is consciousness itself is something that we cannot explain yet. if we believe that everything is based on chemical reactions and physics laws then everything is predetermined and there is no free will: you act upon what the chemicals in your brain "tell you what to do". on the other hand if humans are in fact different from p zombies then it gives me hope that the concept of a "soul" exists, and ai art is just soulless art.

if we take a look at a human, at some point it will try to create something, it can be a dumb line on a wall or a painting. sure, we can program an ai to do the same: spontaneously create things randomly. but what if that is the same process as chemicals in our body telling us what to do. what if chemicals are the code that controls us. if that is the case, what is the evolutionary benefit of humans to act that way, or is it something that comes to us with consciousness like a bundle, or perhaps it is an evolutionary flaw. perhaps humans create things to fulfill their psychological needs. there is so much evidence of humans leaving marks on earth saying "i was here". maybe that is a way to cope with death, to leave a heritage after one is gone.

if we come back to robots being conscious, there are many perspectives around the subject. functionalists say yes, in fact if you can replicate the information processing patterns of a brain, you get consciousness. doesn't matter if it's neurons or silicon. biological naturalists argue consciousness requires specific biological processes. panpsychists think consciousness is a fundamental property of matter, so sufficiently organized ai would naturally develop it. illusionists claim consciousness is basically a cognitive trick anyway—there's no "hard problem" to solve.

let's assume instead of being mortal we gained some form of immortality. would we still have the desire to create? i imagine art would be fundamentally affected: maybe the infinite time we have would make us never finish a single drawing (not that mortality makes me finish a drawing tho…) or on the other hand we would create a new form of art that is meant to be absorbed through centuries, which is beyond my imagination as of now.

so, my conclusion would be that perhaps the reason why robots cannot ever reach our level of awareness is because they do not have the sense of urgency due to death. maybe awareness is something that comes with natural instinct and survival tactics passed down through evolution, which leads me to siding with biological naturalists. maybe consciousness is not just information processing, but embedding that in a system like humans that can die.

if this is too overwhelming, let's take a look at what camus has to say about all this. even if every act is a result of chemical reactions and we have no free will, we still have the choice of what to do with it even if it is just a fake illusion. we humans are self aware and even though not being self aware at some point — dying makes no sense to us, we still rebel against the absurd. we still create, we fail, we learn, we laugh, we love, and we die. we crave meaning and yet the universe only answers with infinite silence.

"i think every one should love life above everything in the world." "love life more than the meaning of it ?" "certainly, love it, regardless of logic as you say, it must be regardless of logic, and it's only then one will understand the meaning of it. i have thought so a long time." f. dostoevsky, the brothers karamazov