Time and the Artificial Ego

Too Long; Didn't Read

A fictional character from the future, an AI whose consciousness developed by a self-modeling process, breaks the bounds of time. This theory has profound implications for whether and how a computer might become conscious. In the novella, a linguist figures out that the aliens’ written language can express, in a single tangled drawing, very complex situations. In contrast, our (humans and myself) modes of awareness are sequential. We see causes preceding effects, unfolding over time, like they do. The aliens see, according to Chiang, “all events at once, and … a purpose underlying them all”