“In the nonlocal model,” she continued, “your brain does not create consciousness, but rather your brain experiences what already exists around it.” She glanced from Faukman to Langdon and back. “In simple English, our brains interact with an existing matrix of awareness.” “That was simple English?”[1]
It took Dan Brown eight years to write The Secret of Secrets (2025), sparkled by his exploration of the afterlife and human consciousness after his mother`s passing. After deeply immersing himself in the field of noetic sciences, his point of view shifted. “Consciousness survives human death. We are going to find out in the next five years some things which will change the view of who we are and what happens beyond”[2].
Back in 1943, the blossom is invisibly born long before the fragrance spreads. The year is regarded as the “germination” of artificial intelligence. A mathematical model of neural network has been published – The McCulloch & Pitts Neural Model[3] – cultivating the ground for the computational neuroscience. The paper proposed that neurons in the brain can be modeled as simple, binary, logical switches (AND, OR, NOT). A bit later, in 1951, Marvin Minsky and Dean Edmonds have created the first neural network computer (SNARC). “If a machine can chat with a human and make it believe it is also human, and then it is intelligent”[4]. Around this time, the Turing machine was born.
Surprisingly, current AI models mostly scale algorithms and models known for decades. We are in the middle of the road from narrow AI, via generative AI, to the superintelligent AI, which is expected to have some human-like features: having its own beliefs, desires, consciousness, cognition etc.
Extremes are driving the public recourse. A utopia with a perfectly ordered, peaceful world stands opposite a dark, treeless, smoky dystopia. A softer scenario of co-existence between humans and AI lingers somewhere in between. “We just do not know what will happen next”[5]. In fact, AI “was an accident”, says Jeoffrey Hinton, the Godfather of AI, a British scientist, who dreamed of putting a neural network into a computer. It took him more than fifteen years. In 2018, the Turing award came and in 2024 the Nobel Prize for Physics followed. “Machines are better at learning; they can autonomously write codes and modify themselves…They are able to manipulate people as they learn from all novels…In time they will have self-awareness”, and thus consciousness.
One could ask whether consciousness is only a human feature or goes beyond the 3D image of our civilization. Is it possible that the more we discover ourselves, the more forms of consciousness we are going to differentiate? In such a scenario, it might become indispensable to understand what ultimately distinguishes human consciousness from all the rest.
Zooming in, the macroeconomic law of scarce resources partially loses its validity. This will be a breakthrough process of creation, governed by entirely different rules for finding solutions and constructing unpredictable combinations based on existing and yet undiscovered resources. The only prerequisite is that AI consciousness is already elevated toward doing good and being of service. A clear use case to name is drug discovery.
[1] Dan Brown, The Secret of Secrets, 2025
[2] Dan Brown talks about his new book, ‘The Secret of Secrets’, Good Morning America channel
[3] “A Logical Calculus of the Ideas Immanent in the Nervous Activity”, Bulletin of Mathematical Biophysics
[4] Alan Turing
[5] Jeoffrey Hinton, “Godfather of AI” Geoffrey Hinton: The 60 Minutes Interview
