David Clancy 12 Nov 2024 

In the fading light of this technological autumn, Anthony Seldon’s warning echoes like thunder across our cultural landscape. His recent ‘Weekend Essay’ in The Times, 26 Oct 2024, speaks to a growing unease about artificial intelligence’s encroachment on human learning and development. 

‘Warning from A.I. is stark: we have 2 years to save learning’

Beneath this immediate concern, he asks the deeper question that has haunted humanity since Darwin first suggested we might be merely clever apes: What does it mean to be human? The deepest, most profound question possible cannot be answered with a sound bite. Or can it?

The Voices of Warning

The article marshals an impressive chorus of concerned voices:

• Neil Lawrence, professor of machine learning at Cambridge University, tells us that since generative AI’s release, “a desperate situation is getting worse.” 

• Geoffrey Hinton, the Nobel laureate known as the “Godfather of AI,” warns that “once these artificial intelligences get smarter than us, they will take control and they will make us irrelevant.” 

• Lord Rees, the astronomer royal, speaks of the “reduction of human contact,” 

• while Professor Rose Luckin of UCL calls for “a much richer understanding of human intelligence and how it differs from artificial intelligence.”

These are not the voices of Luddites or fearmongers. These are the architects of our digital future expressing deep concern about their creation. 

Their warnings bring us to yet another moment in human history that requires us to look back and take stock of where we are now, before we can look forward. Optimistically or with head in the sand or with a bloody-minded determination to keep calm, wake-up and make the best of it, as Seldon himself recommends in his essay.

The Darwinian Earthquake

Since Darwin’s theory of evolution shook the foundations of human self-understanding, we have been living in the aftershocks. The idea that humans might be merely clever animals, products of blind chance and natural selection, has gradually eroded our sense of special purpose. This erosion has manifested in waves of existentialism, materialism, and ultimately nihilism that have shaped the last 170 years of human thought for many people. 

The result? A society where many are adrift in the shallow waters of consumerism, characterized by deep distrust of institutions and authority, and pervaded by a simmering anger. This anger stems from our collective loss of meaning – anger at ourselves for not being special, anger at those who claim moral authority in what many now see as a meaningless universe.

The Search for Human Essence

When Seldon poses his central question about human nature, he asks AI itself, and receives a striking response: 

“Asking ethical questions, existential reflection, philosophy, intuition and emotional experience of feelings.” 

Seldon dismisses this answer as “tellingly transactional,” but nonetheless this transactional capability might be the key to unlocking the long-term, self-sustaining funding for the ‘reimagining of education’ for which Seldon now calls.

The Superpower of Humans

The AI’s response actually represents a superset of Seldon’s own carefully crafted list of uniquely human qualities:

• Curiosity

• Agency 

• Consciousness

• Awe and wonder

• Love and empathy

• Divine apprehension

• Family belonging. 

Each of these qualities flows from our capacity for self-aware conscious understanding which feeds our emotional experience and existential reflection.

The Superset of the Superset

Standing next to Big Ben, under Le Tour Eiffel or in front of The White House, we don’t need to understand the native language of each country to know that we are viewing the foundations upon which these nations have been built. All that is required is to look around.

Similarly, we don’t need to know the language by which scientists and philosophers discuss and understand the universe to know the foundation and rules governing our existence. All that is required is that we allow them to bring us to the gateways that they have discovered and have the confidence and trust in them to have a look around ourselves and then walk on through them to enjoy the rewards of their discoveries.

In terms of answering Seldon’s question ‘What does it mean to be human’, the most important of these gateways is the one that separates the logical, inductive or ‘computational’ world of the computer, from that of human’s unique ability of conscious understanding. 

This separation is very important because A.I. can only do logical, inductive i.e computational thinking, whilst we humans can do all three. 

Truly, the non-computational conscious understanding of humans is our special superpower. 

So isn’t this component of Seldon’s list – consciousness – the mission-critical higher truth here, in defining what it is to be human? 

It’s the superset of the superset, waiting to be more widely recognized and understood by us all, namely that the non-computational conscious understanding of humans really is our special superpower, as both an innate quality and a transactional possibility of which only we humans – and never computational computers or A.I. – are authentically capable. 

This isn’t just poetic rhetoric – it’s supported by one of the most rigorous mathematical minds of our time.

A Love Letter to Humanity

Whilst we humans don’t need to know the native language to consciously understand something we nonetheless sometimes like to listen to it, even if we don’t know the language, say for example, to hear a love song in French because the feeling it creates radiates meaning through us.

Likewise the next few paragraphs might be in a language that most of us do not understand, being the thinking of one of the most rigorous mathematical minds of our time, but he is nonetheless worth reading in order to get the gist of it, in order to be brought to the gateway and thereby the feeling that the ideas being described, albeit in a foreign language, are in fact a love letter to humanity.

The Penrose Insight

Mathematical physicist, philosopher of science and Nobel Laureate in Physics Sir Roger Penrose’s journey to this insight, to his love letter to humanity, began with his own understanding of the consequences of:

Gödel’s Incompleteness Theorem, which proved that within any consistent formal system complex enough to represent basic arithmetic, there are truths that cannot be proved within that system. 

When Penrose contemplated how humans can nevertheless understand and recognize these unprovable truths, he realized something revolutionary: 

human understanding itself cannot be computational, with the critical corollary being that 

‘It can’t be described by the physics that we know’, by definition.

Getting to the Heart of the Matter

This not a small claim. It strikes at the heart of our assumptions about consciousness and intelligence, about ourselves, about who and what are we humans?

“Our consciousness is beyond the physics that we know”

Thus, when we humans understand something – truly understand it, not just process it – we are doing something that cannot be reduced to any algorithm, no matter how sophisticated.

“It Must be External” 

Gödel/Penrose demonstrated mathematically that human consciousness must involve something beyond computation, beyond the physics that we know and concludes that “it must be external”.

But if consciousness isn’t computational, if it is beyond the physics that we know, what is it? 

The Quantum Yawn

Nothing irritates many a biologist, astro-physicist or mathematician more than the tiresome ‘nutters’ who populate social media and hijack their rigorous scientific enquiries for the purpose of propagating personal, spiritual, philosophical beliefs.

Penrose is different. He is a mathematical physicist, philosopher of science and Nobel Laureate in physics. He looked for where there is a gap in our knowledge of physics to explain his insights on the non-computational reality of how humans are able to consciously understand, according to his reflections on the implications of Gödel’s Incompleteness Theorem.

The only place to look turns out to be quantum mechanics, specifically to what he calls the “measurement problem”. The mysterious collapse of quantum superpositions when an observation is made.

Again, we do not need to know the language of physics in order to see that Penrose has brought us to an important gateway here in the effort to define what it means to be human, which as it happens, is a gateway through which we are all going through all the time already.

 “The continuous evolution of the Schrödinger equation and the probabilistic thing that happens when you (and it must be a human) make a measurement,” he observes, “These two things fit nicely together but they are inconsistent with each other.”

In this apparent paradox, Penrose sees a clue to human consciousness. The non-computational nature of human understanding might arise from the same mysterious quantum processes that make measurement – conscious measurement to boot – so puzzling. 

While we don’t yet know exactly how this works, Penrose establishes not only that our consciousness must involve something “external” to classical computation but that such can never be replicated by classical computing machines. 

Humans are not computers. 

A.I. is a computer. 

Therefore humans are uniquely different to A.I. 

and that difference is the ability to understand, consciously.

That conclusion is the ultimate love letter from the the universe, from Penrose, to humanity: we are special, even if we do not yet fully understand the process by which that uniqueness happens.

The Counter – Argument Fallacy

Are there those who do not accept the Gödel/Penrose mathematical proof and insight into the uniqueness of human conscious understanding? Yes, of course.

Our culture is full of fantasy books and films where A.I. becomes conscious. Many scientists and A.I. specialists believe this too but all is not what it seems.

There is no evidence to support these beliefs whose intellectual status is on a par with religion, except that the latter do not, generally, claim scientific credibility.

Dear John Letters to Ourselves

Why do we write these Dear John letters to ourselves, ending our sense of being special, severing our relationship with real meaning?

Perhaps this is just another fall-out from the Darwinian earthquake, another expression of the century-long ingrained belief that we humans were not special in the past, are not special now in the present, and nor will we be in the future.

Psychologically, so much has been invested by so many, throughout their lives in this nihilism, that these fantasies of A.I. acquiring consciousness can be seen almost as a form of collective self-harm. A wishful thinking that reconfirms and justifies the sense of being a victim, of the right to feel that the God, in which belief no longer exists, has nonetheless delivered a final, cruel blow: false hope and thereby the absence of true meaning in life.  

It is this counter-argument which is the fallacy. There is not an iota of scientific evidence to suggest, as many do, including Geoffrey Hilton, that complex computational systems will spontaneously become conscious, as an ‘emergent’ property. 

Dear John’s ‘Catch 22’ 

Of course this is not impossible, perhaps it will happen but the scientific evidence that it will do so, is zero, it is a belief at the same level as that other belief in emergent properties of complex neural networks known as life after death; with the ironic consequence for those Dear John letter writers whose boat is floated by belief in the spontaneous emergence of properties from complex neural networks, that that same boat, floating – as it is most likely to be doing – on the same strange quantum ocean of ‘uncertainty’, on those quantum waves of probability, is chugging along too for those who belief in life after death, carrying them all the way to their heaven, on precisely the same inference that is taking the Dear Johns to their Artificial General Intelligence hell.

This is the Dear John Catch 22: If the belief in the spontaneous emergence of consciousness of complex neural networks is not true, humans are, special today, because we already have this superior ability; if it is true, then we are the more so special because our spontaneous emergence after death might be similarly true, based on precisely the same type of belief.

The idea that such is inevitable or even likely is therefore not science, but a belief, and as with all belief systems, is liable to trigger self-reinforcing myths, powered by fashion and politics, which rapidly spread like an infectious virus, as if they are not myths but fact, as comically illustrated in Python’s ‘Life of Brian’.

How widespread has this virus that A.I. will become conscious spread?

Hilton speaks of his amazement at being awarded the Nobel prize for Physics, when he himself is not a physicist. He dropped out of physics at college, when, as again he says himself, “the maths became too difficult”.

By contrast, the maths and physics is not too difficult for Gödel/Penrose and their analysis of Gödel’s Mathematical Incompleteness Theory concludes that conscious understanding is external to computation, and therefore beyond the reach of A.I.

A Conscious Choice for Humans 

So having scanned the ideas set-out in the foreign languages of scientists and philosophers above, should we chose the one that sustains or the one that immobilises us? The Love Letter to Humanity or the Dear John? The one which answers the question ‘What does it mean to be human?” by offering a scientific rationale which connects humans together with the special and unique quality of conscious understanding or the one which, without evidence of any description, severs that invaluable connection?

In fact the choice is a false one, the two choices are not incompatible. 

The Two Mountains

To understand our present predicament then, let’s imagine two mountains rising through the mists of human experience. The first mountain is the Mountain of Knowledge – a place of computation, information processing, and logical reasoning. This is the mountain that AI climbs with increasing speed and surety, threatening to reach heights beyond human capability.

But there is a second mountain, one that rises above the clouds that will forever, by definition [Gödel/Penrose], shroud the first. This is the Mountain of Conscious Understanding – the realm of self-aware conscious experience, including of feelings, of love, and all the other intuitions and which, now, should not be dismissed too easily. 

While we humans may never reach the summit of the Knowledge Mountain, we already inhabit the slopes of the superior Consciousness Mountain, a higher realm where we might, or might not, one day be joined by A.I. but where we humans are already, and that makes us unique and special forever, come what may because our self-aware conscious understanding is on another level, capable of reaching above the clouds, far above the Mountain of Knowledge.

The Bridge

What Penrose offers us is nothing less than a bridge from science to human uniqueness. His work suggests that our consciousness isn’t just different from computation in degree, but in kind. It operates according to principles that no purely computational system can ever achieve and according to a physics that is unknown to us still.

This transforms our relationship with AI from one of fear to one of clarity. AI may climb ever higher on the Mountain of Knowledge, but it remains bound by the limits of computation. We humans, through our external, quantum-enabled consciousness, already inhabit a higher peak – not because we’re better at computation, but because we’re fundamentally different from it.

Nurturing The Pilgrims of Understanding

This is where humans should see themselves. Not necessarily at the top of their mountain themselves, at the pinnacle all the time but at least inhabiting the foothills, on the proverbial pilgrim journey. The birds and beasts, we know today, are on the same mountain, keeping us company. As are the trees around us and the swirling seas beneath us. 

This is the mountain of understanding, of self-aware consciousness and like all ecologies its members need nurturing but this is something that they must do themselves, individually and together, it is no good shouting down from the pinnacle, or even whispering. This is personal. Everyone, individually and collectively, as a society, must clamber up step by step, from the bottom, up. As Seldon himself advises. 

“I feel, therefore I am”

Perhaps, then, we need to revise Descartes’ famous declaration defining what it is to be human. Instead of “I think, therefore I am,” we might now say, with much greater confidence and understanding: “I feel, therefore I am.” This is not a retreat from reason but an advance toward a more complete understanding of human nature. Our capacity for love, empathy, and emotional experience isn’t a bug in our rational machinery – it’s the feature that makes us uniquely human, one that flows from conscious understanding.

The Educational Challenge

Seldon calls for a “re-imagining of education,” and he’s right. But this re-imagining must go beyond merely adapting to AI’s capabilities. It must nurture the uniquely human qualities that AI cannot replicate. This transformation, as Seldon also observes, must rise up from the bottom up, driven by individuals and communities rather than imposed from above. It is not possible to instruct someone to feel that their essence is special but it is possible to teach them how to curate, manage and enjoy their own experiences towards that end.

Making ‘Bloody-Minded’ Progress

Yes we live in a world of cynicism, of fear and inertia, of the endless manipulated distractions that numb our existential pain, of the thereby low, debilitating aspiration sabotaging the efforts of those who seek to build regenerative frameworks – e.g. schools – that strive to help us to raise our heads above the parapet and, bloody-minded, onto the battlefield of hope. 

So here we go again with what for good reason we will call ‘The Rainbow Framework’. As scientific and technological development take another profound turn as we approach the end of the first quarter of the 21st century, this new Rainbow Framework is just now becoming visible between those two mountains, as a new light and a new wind of change is diffused through that miserable mist and fog which has clouded our perception of ourselves for over 170 years. 

This rainbow embodies a ridiculously ambitious programme of action and points to a necessarily global direction of travel which our bloody-minded determination can follow, step by step, to re-imagine education – and its heretofore distant cousin, live entertainment – to enable everyone to rise above the parapet, out of the trenches of despondency into which we have dug ourselves.

A new ‘Rainbow’ Framework

What we need, and what is now on offer below, is a new Rainbow Framework that enables renewed human development and enjoyment – one that celebrates our emotional intelligence alongside our computational capabilities, that creates spaces for authentic human interaction, that builds real, physically close communities around shared experiences and values. 

We need a way, and such is on offer below, to encourage this Rainbow Framework to nudge each of us, individually and collectively, to lift ourselves out of the trenches by understanding that the answer to the question “What makes ME, as a human, unique?” “What makes US, as humans, unique?” is a profoundly positive one, that we are indeed special, that, as a result, we are worth nurturing, respecting, loving; that, as a result, we can raise our personal and collective aspirations onto an altogether higher plane, on journey to the top of our very special mountain of consciousness.

Of course, this will not be a sudden, spontaneous, or even explicitly intended, metaphysical examination – we are all too deeply mired in the trenches of the day-to-day struggle for material and mental survival, for that – but it can happen as a ‘bloody-minded’, relentless, slow diffusion, an osmotic leach of light through the mist, gradually forming the rainbow, the prism through which the true meaning of our unique conscious understanding can displace the all-pervading fog and its fashionably jaundiced perception of ourselves.

So where and how might this diffusion, this gradual exchange, this reimagining of education, take place? Where is this new rainbow pointing? What is it enabling us to do? How might it achieve this transformation and why is it appearing now?

Live Experiences Re-imagined

There is one other unique characteristic of what it is to be human that can make all the difference in this exchange, this diffusion, this nurturing, this re-imagination. One which provides a practical means of expressing and materialising our difference and that is where and when each of us is physically – and mentally – present. 

Our individual GPS is, by definition, unique

Our individual GPS is, by definition, unique and it is also, as we shall see, precious, the key to the regeneration not only of local communities but of our human spirit, our joie de vivre. 

We can only be in one place at a time, so when we decide to be somewhere, rather than somewhere else, we are offering something that is, again, unique, precious and of value, to ourselves and to each other. 

We can not only nurture ourselves in this way, pilgrims as we are on our unique mountain of self-aware consciousness but we can build a new self-sustaining transactional economy on valuing our physical and mental presence in this way.

In so doing we will ‘self-generate’ the resources that we need to effect the transformation in education for which so many, including Anthony Seldon, are calling.

If this Sounds like Capitalism, It is Not

If this sounds like capitalism, it is not, this new rainbow framework is neither a business, an institution or a company: instead, it’s a movement, a game changer.

Today we have a new way of manifesting the belief and resources which, together, get things done. A rainbow framework. Instead of seeking investors to invest their money – with the thereby implicit need for all the paraphernalia of capitalism, including corporations, company boards, profit etc – today new ideas can use their own implicit value to create their own, sector-specific, means of exchange which manifests that value, in a self-sustaining, self-funding, mutually beneficial ecosystem, where automatic stability is intrinsic to the ecosystem.

This new rainbow framework disassembles and removes the traditional economic hierarchy of consumer, customer, worker, manager, director and shareholder, creating a truly level playing field and an economic sector democracy which becomes the true catalyst of a bottom-up revolution in the reimagining of education.  

Scarcity, Friction and Risk

We need this new rainbow way of making ideas happen, of foundation, because creating the practical transactional economy that funds and facilitates the transformation in education, and thereby in our perception of ourselves as humans, that we need, top down, is near impossible, not least because the budget deficits and total indebtedness of all our governments are at all time highs. There are simply too many other calls on a nation’s resources. 

If nations can exist and trade happily with and within each other, why can’t a specific sector be a nation? A newly defined, self-sustaining, global nation?

Equally the friction and financial risk around creating a new economic-sector, based on we humans valuing this unique gift of where we are physically at any time and place – live experiences – is so high it means that creating what value there is in this sector today, is the preserve of large institutions, with huge resources, who are able to absorb the financial risk. 

Wagging the ‘Live’ Long Tail

Yes we do, as a society, already have the means to create free experiences at the other end of the scale: village fetes, church services, amateur sports clubs but this is to miss the vast long-tail of human conscious understanding which Amazon has been so successful at identifying and then distributing by selling books online.

This is a waste, an untapped resource, latent with regenerative energy, that we can no longer allow to continue and to escape us. 

A parallel revolution is now requisite in the physical live experience sector if we are to be able to fund the development of our individual and collective response to A.I., to rise to the challenge and grasp this opportunity and liberate how we nurture the unique characteristics of humanity. 

We can bring about this revolution and end this scarcity and get this dormant long tail wagging with this new rainbow framework which mitigates the twin risks of financial loss and the operational failure – boredom, lack of motivation, not being emotionally present – which is often the result of compulsory, top down curation of live experiences, including some of those delivered in the classroom.

A Re-imagining…

A ‘re-imagining of education’, of traditional education institutions, of the live experience industry, of the High Street retail industry, of all the under-used spaces in our towns, villages and cities where humans might gather, would be able to seamlessly knit all these places together into a regenerative critical mass of value derived from the uniqueness of where we, as humans, choose to be, in the physical world at any given moment. 

This critical mass, of valuing where we physically are, is both beautifully parochial and massively global at the same time

This critical mass, of valuing where we physically are, is both beautifully parochial and massively global at the same time. Until now there has been no glue, no magnate, no energy to materialise this mass but now that the challenge of A.I. to the morale of humans is clear and present, the time has come to remake our world by coalescing this critical mass, whose implicit value we can use to start the fight back which reinstalls humans at the pinnacle of meaning in an otherwise unconscious, for all we know, universe.

Participating, Experiencing, Feeling

The new requirement therefore is for a democratic, bottom-up, experience-focused, human-centered reimagining of education that Seldon calls for, through live experiences in every subject and genre, to stimulate human’s unique consciousness, anywhere and everywhere.

Bottom-up means developing a platform where individuals can curate their own educational experiences, individually and collectively

Bottom-up means developing a platform where individuals can curate their own educational experiences, individually and collectively, building the authentic human connections that Lord Rees fears we’re losing, offering a practical answer to Professor Luckin’s call for a richer understanding of human intelligence, creating spaces where emotional and social intelligence can flourish alongside traditional learning.

To be both local and global, this platform cannot be a business, a company or an institution, this must be a movement, capable of reaching and joining up every local community on earth: a game changer. 

Today we have a new means of manifesting the requisite belief to make things like this happen.

Today we have a new means of manifesting the requisite belief to make things like this happen. In the face of AI’s relentless advance up the Mountain of Knowledge, we need the tools to climb our own mountain – the Mountain of Consciousness – not through competition with machines but through the cultivation of our uniquely human capacities for non-computational, conscious understanding, feeling, connection, and love.

We need the resources to do this in a world where those resources are not obviously available. So we need to invent this new rainbow framework ourselves locally but also in such a way that enables the whole world to do so with us, globally. In this way we will achieve the requisite, awesome critical mass globally, which thereby, cannot fail to attract towards it what it needs to make the idea happen.

The Rainbow

And so, through the clouds, a new rainbow framework is forming to unearth real gold, extremely precious gold, the gold that is in us all, at the end of the rainbow. 

This emerging, new rainbow is:

1. Transformational: because it enables humans to rediscover their uniqueness, locally and globally

2. Needed, Economically: because it transforms global education, retail, & live experience sectors

3. Sustainable: because it self-funds through a global, sector-specific, stable currency

4. Eco-Friendly: because it uses hybrid Proof of Authority/Proof of Stake consensus

5. Democratic: because its non-automatic decisions are governed by a diverse Electoral College

6. Secure: because it uses smart contracts & because all its transactions are, by definition, transparent

7. Just: because it operates within regulatory jurisdictions using built-in reporting capabilities

ROCKRCOIN: The Rainbow Crypto

 Together with its 30+ ROCKR apps, smart contracts and reverse auctions, ROCKRCOIN enables everyone and anyone to curate and attend live experiences in every subject and genre, anywhere, anytime.

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