In an age when machines can simulate, with the sheer force of computation, mind-things like poems, she asks, is the mind still a sovereign place? What heavenly and hellish creations can it alone make that no algorithm can reproduce or mimic?" Meaning might be the last stalwart of human consciousness in the age of AI — the supreme existential yearning irreducible to computation, the great creative restlessness that foments all our poems and our passions.
The poetic neurologist Oliver Sacks (July 9, 1933–August 30, 2015) takes up these questions in a prescient April 1993 New York Review of Books essay occasioned by the Nobel-winning neuroscientist Gerald Edelman’s book Bright Air, Brilliant Fire: On The Matter Of The Mind but, like every great book review, soaring far beyond the book itself and into the broader questions of consciousness, the nature of the mind, and what it means to be human.
"Beneath the enthusiasm about scientific developments, there is a certain thinness, a poverty and unreality compared to what we know of human nature, the complexity and density of the emotions we feel and of the thoughts we have.” In a sentiment reminding us how miraculous it is that a cold cosmos kindled consciousness at all, he writes: We read excitedly of the latest chemical, computational, or quantum theory of mind, and then ask, “Is that all there is to it"
Keep reading. It is worth the effort. You may also understand the need to fill the void with drugs of those who fall in the void.
Consciousness, Artificial Intelligence, and Our Search for Meaning: Oliver Sacks on ChatGPT, 30 Years Before ChatGPT ..