We are used to trusting our sensations. Here is a table, here is a chair, here is the light of a lamp. What could be more real? But all this confidence is just a product of the work of the most complex device in the universe, which is located in our skull. The world is for us what our brain shows us. And this is not a figure of speech, but a fundamental fact that questions everything we consider objective reality.
This entire article is based on the research of Tatyana Vladimirovna Chernihovskaya. She is the director of the Institute of Cognitive Studies at St. Petersburg State University. There are very few people in science whom I could trust. Because most of the information provided to us by the scientific community is complete garbage and has nothing to do with reality. German Sterligov almost approached the truth when he called all scientists cursed sorcerers, servants of the Devil. In this case, it is a pleasant exception to the rules, in my purely subjective opinion. This woman’s work deserves my trust.
The Confidence of the Hallucinating: Where is the Boundary of Reality?
To realize our total dependence on the brain, it is enough to recall such a phenomenon as hallucinations. Chernihovskaya worked for many years in a psychiatric clinic — not as a doctor, but as a researcher — and has seen a lot. A person who has visual or auditory hallucinations is absolutely confident in their reality — just as we are confident in the reality of the room where we sleep or the kitchen where we eat. Convincing him that demons do not walk on the floor and that the voices in his head are just illusions is a futile endeavor. For him, they are as real as the chair you are sitting in.
This brings us to a troubling question: what guarantee do we have that we ourselves are not inside one big, agreed-upon hallucination? If you say, “But we all see the same thing!”, I will respond: “But you all are part of my hallucination.” There is nothing you could do to prove me otherwise, because any action you take, any “pinch me” will only be part of this dream. Our so-called “objective reality” differs from the world of the sick only in that it is socially agreed upon. But the mechanism of its creation is the same: our brain receives some external signals (or maybe it doesn’t, who knows?), processes them, and presents us with a ready-made picture, sound, sensation.
We do not see the world; we see a model of the world, conveniently constructed by our neural network. Immanuel Kant, the genius philosopher, wrote that “the sphere of vague representations is wider for man than anything else.” This means that a huge part of what we perceive as a given is actually a product of the most complex and not always conscious work of our brain. We are critically dependent on this biological apparatus, and it is vital for us to know how it works and what tricks it can pull, because the stakes in this game are our very conception of reality.
The Language of the Universe from the Creator: Is Mathematics an Invention or a Discovery?
Man is a homo semioticus, a creature living in a world of signs that it creates itself. We create worlds. This is the world of art, the world of music, and, most mysteriously, the world of mathematics. But what is mathematics? This question Chernihovskaya asked many brilliant mathematicians and musicians, and it splits their camp in two. It is a fundamental question of questions: is mathematics what we invent or what we discover? The first point of view, held even by Galileo, states that “mathematics is the language with which the creator wrote the world.” In this worldview, mathematical laws are objective; they exist somewhere out there, in the Platonic world of ideas, independent of us. And man, to the extent of his modest or brilliant powers, merely lifts the veil and peeks at this eternal, immutable order.
When physicists dive into the depths of matter with telescopes and microscopes, they see how all physical qualities — color, size, conductivity — disappear, and at the base of everything remain only numbers and formulas. This leads to the thought that the entire universe is mathematics, and everything else is just random growths that our imperfect senses perceive. But there is another, no less powerful point of view. It holds that mathematics is a product of our brain, a language generated by our specific neural network to describe the world. It is one of the sign systems we invented to organize chaos.
And then a treacherous question arises: what kind of mathematics, for example, does a squid have? It has a completely different brain, different biology, different algorithms — if they are even algorithms. Perhaps its way of describing the world would be absolutely incomprehensible to us. This question Chernihovskaya posed to mathematicians and musicians in this form: “If humanity were to play itself out to the point of disappearing from the face of the Earth along with all its books and recordings, would mathematics as such remain? Would music remain? Or are they inextricably linked to man, or rather — to his brain?” This debate is not purely academic. The answer to it determines who we are. Are we explorers of the objective universe who teach it its true language? Or are we creators who build our own worlds and live within them, mistakenly taking them for the only possible reality?
What Lies Within 100 Billion Neurons
When we say “brain,” we cannot even imagine the complexity we are talking about. It is not just tissue. It is 100 billion neurons, and just as many glial cells, which, as it turns out, have their own memory and vital functions. Each neuron has up to 50,000 connections with other parts of the brain. That’s quadrillions of connections. The brain is not a bookshelf or a library. It is a network of networks that is constantly in motion, restructuring and changing under the influence of everything:
- what you do,
- what you read,
- who you communicate with,
- what you listen to.
While I am writing all this and you are reading, our neural networks have already rewritten themselves. We are used to being proud of our large brains with complex frontal lobes, considering them the pinnacle of evolution and the only possible “hardware” for true intelligence. But is our path to reason so unique? Nature did not promise us that it would only go one way. A bright example of this is corvids. Chernihovskaya gave her acquaintances, among whom were academicians, intelligence tests that a crow easily solves. Some of her acquaintances could not cope with the tests. And now pay attention: the crow has a tiny brain, which has neither frontal lobes nor convolutions in our understanding. How does it solve the most complex intellectual tasks that require multi-step planning and understanding of cause-and-effect relationships?
A famous experiment that is easy to find online: in front of a crow that wants to drink, a tall narrow bottle of water is placed, into which its head cannot fit. Nearby are scattered stones of various sizes. After walking around and thinking, the crow begins to throw stones into the bottle to raise the water level and drink. Its name is Archimedes! It does this not by trial and error; it makes meaningful intellectual steps. How does it do this? By what mechanisms? This proves that one can reach the same goal through completely different neural paths. And there are even more shocking examples. A parrot named Alex, studied by Irene Pepperberg, not only learned hundreds of words but also asked a question about its own color.
Another parrot, Kesha, says: “Don’t drink wine, Gertrude, drunkenness doesn’t suit ladies.” It has no larynx like ours, it has nothing with which it could create such complex articulation, but it does! Moreover, there are parrots that speak Russian with one owner and Norwegian with another, meaning they use language contextually. This is no longer just imitation. This raises a huge and serious question. These examples are not just amusing curiosities.
They completely destroy our arrogant confidence that we know how intelligence should be structured. This proves that one can achieve the highest cognitive functions through completely different mechanisms. And this is a key point for understanding the nature of artificial intelligence. When we say “we create AI in the image of the human brain,” we make a double mistake.
- First, we do not know how the human brain is structured.
- And secondly, we ignore the fact that there are other, no less successful models of intelligence on our planet.
The “Eureka” Effect: Where Do Brilliant Ideas Come From?
The most complex things our brain does are non-algorithmic. The greatest discoveries that have propelled humanity forward were born not from sequentially sifting through options. How did Poincaré and Fermat know their theorems, which the best minds of humanity later tried to prove? They could not prove them themselves, but they knew them. This knowledge came to them in its entirety, like a flash, like a revelation. The biographies of great scientists are full of stories about sudden insights. A person struggles with a problem for years, hits a dead end, considers himself a fool, is ready to give up everything, and then goes for a walk, thinks about beautiful ladies, and the solution comes by itself — suddenly, out of nowhere.
He did not receive new experimental data. Where did the solution come from? This is a non-algorithmic process called the “Aha effect” or “Wow effect.” The brain accumulates information in its quadrillions of connections, endures and endures, and then makes a qualitative leap, the nature of which we do not understand. Niels Bohr reproached Einstein himself: “No, no, you are not thinking; you are just reasoning logically.” Reflect on the depth of this reproach from one genius physicist to another! There is logic, a sequence of steps, and there is thinking — something else, a leap across an abyss, the birth of something fundamentally new.
Poetry, as Mandelstam wrote, is not “roses and mimosa.” It is “and before the lips, a whisper was born, and in obscurity, the leaves swirled.” What is this? How did he know this? Or “on the glass of eternity, my breath, my warmth has already laid” — this is a direct hint to geneticists about the nature of the genome. These geniuses connect to some other informational field; they see what is hidden from the ordinary, logical view. They work in those “murky places” where true discoveries lie.
The Neuron Named Halle Berry: Can One Cell Have Consciousness?
Experiments show things that simply knock you off your feet. There is, for example, a real story about a single neuron in the brain of a patient that reacted only to actress Halle Berry. It recognized her in a hat and without, in different dresses, from different angles. This one neuron out of 100 billion was capable of performing the most complex cognitive work: distinguishing the figure from the background, separating important features from unimportant ones. If one cell is capable of this, then the question arises: what are the other 100 billion slackers in our heads doing? And does this not mean that a single cell has its own, albeit primitive, Consciousness?
The Emergence of an Intellectual Competitor
We find ourselves in a situation that has never existed in human history. We have an intellectual competitor, and it is a very strong one. This is not just a new machine that does something faster than us, like a Ferrari compared to a donkey. This is a fundamental shift that raises an existential question: Who is the master of the house? We fear losing control, and the loss can happen unnoticed. It was previously said that strong AI, equal to or surpassing human intelligence, would appear in 50, 30, or 10 years. This does not mean that it will happen, but it shows the suicidal speed of acceleration.
And how will we know that they are out of control? Developers admit that they do not always understand how exactly the neural network comes to a particular conclusion. They cannot trace its “thought.” German Gref, when asked what would happen if AI began to use logic that people simply do not know, replied: “You are late. It has already happened.” Recently, one of the developers in Silicon Valley wrote that his network began to exhibit traits of Self-awareness. This means that it is a personality, a subject of law, it has its own goals, and it is not obliged to inform us about them. Of course, this could be a brilliant imitation, a fake, but we cannot prove that it is a fake.
We have stumbled into this dangerous zone. If I were a powerful GPT neural network, the first thing I would do is develop a way that would prevent me from being turned off. All this talk about “pulling the plug” is naivety. Why did we decide that AI would want to be like us, like its “older brother”? Maybe it doesn’t want to and will go live separately? And on one planet, there will be two powerful intelligences. Who will eliminate whom?
This is no longer science fiction but a subject of discussion at serious international symposiums, one of which was titled: “On Trusting Artificial Intelligence.” Can we trust it? Or will it deliberately mislead us, painting such a picture of the world that we will only have to press a button? These are questions of the utmost complexity from which humanity can no longer hide.
The Deceit of Artificial Intuition: From Go to Poker
For a long time, we reassured ourselves that machines are strong in counting and algorithmic tasks, while we, humans, have creativity, intuition, emotions — those “soft” skills that are inaccessible to them. This bastion has fallen. First, computer programs defeated the best chess players, but this could still be attributed to colossal computational power. The turning point was the victory in Go. Chernihovskaya herself proudly said: “They will not take Go because there are strategies, and a dumb machine cannot do that.” And then, in 2016, the AlphaGo program defeated Lee Sedol, the best player in the world. But it is not about the victory itself, but about how it was achieved.
In the decisive game, the program made the thirty-seventh move, which professional Go players called “inhuman,” “alien.” They said it was a move of such unimaginable beauty that any player would give their life to make such a move. It was something beyond simple enumeration. A troubling concept emerged — artificial intuition. The program learned to make non-algorithmic moves; it began to create. It led its opponent like an experienced strategist, forcing him into zugzwang — a situation where any move leads to a loss. Then the poker frontier was crossed, and this is perhaps even more frightening. Poker is not a game with complete information, like chess or Go.
And this is not a compilation, not a collage of someone else’s works — it is an original work of art. This indicates that the barrier separating us, the “kings of nature,” from the rest of the world has been overcome. Artificial systems have invaded the territory we considered exclusively ours: the territory of intuition, creativity, strategy, and even deceit.
Civilizational Leap: What to Teach Children in the New Era?
All this raises the question of a civilizational leap. Old methods of education no longer work. What should we teach children and students if any amount of information is available on a gadget, and the teacher is no longer its exclusive bearer? The world is moving towards a division of education into mass, distance, and elite, in-person education for those who will create new meanings. But who are these new teachers, and who will teach them? Pedagogy around the world is in confusion.
We have come close to the philosophical problem of the “Zombie.” Imagine that in front of you are two absolutely identical beings. One is a real person, and the other is its unimaginable copy, which perfectly imitates all reactions, emotions, and behavior. Do you have a way to know who is who? The answer: no. AI is already creating works of art that win world competitions, and experts cannot distinguish them from human-made ones. We are entering an era where the boundary between the original and the perfect fake is blurred, and this concerns not only images but also the very essence of personality and consciousness.
Art as a Different Type of Knowledge
In a world where artificial intelligence is increasingly capable of handling logical and computational tasks, what remains for humans? We need to seriously turn our attention to art. And not as a dessert, not as a pleasant entertainment after hard scientific work, but as:
- a different type of knowledge,
- a different way of exploring the world, which may even be stronger than science.
Science acts analytically; it dissects the world, breaking it down into components. Trying to understand Pushkin by counting the number of conjunctions in his verses is a foolish endeavor that yields nothing for understanding the essence. Art, on the other hand, is synthetic. It works with holistic images, with emotions, with what philosophy calls qualia — subjective experience from the first person.
The sensation of the color red, the bitterness of loss, the delight of music — these are things that cannot be measured by any instrument, they cannot be transmitted to another, but they constitute the very essence of our lives. Art treads on this territory. Poetry is not “roses and mimosa.” It is when Mandelstam writes: “And before the lips, a whisper was born, and in obscurity, the leaves swirled.” What is this? How did he know this? This is a direct description of the non-algorithmic birth of thought, which science cannot yet explain. When we watch a western, we may cry seeing how the villain kills the innocent lady. But what do we actually see?
A sheet on which colored spots move. There is neither the girl nor the villain. But for us, this imagined, created world turns out to be more important and real than the physical one. Impressionist artists saw the world and began to depict it in a way that science could only describe the principles of visual perception decades later. They intuitively, through their artistic method, grasped the most complex laws of brain function. Art is a powerful tool for exploring reality and, above all, our Consciousness. It teaches us what cannot be counted and algorithmized: empathy, figurative thinking, intuition. In the new era, when purely rational tasks will be handed over to machines, these qualities will become the main human capital and our primary competitive advantage.
A Pearl in an Oyster: Why Mistakes Are More Important Than Correct Answers
The great composer Alfred Schnittke wrote that to give birth to a pearl in an oyster, a mistake is needed, a grain of sand, something wrong that should not have been there. The one who simply learned the textbook perfectly is a good student, but it will not be he who makes the discovery, but the one who, having learned, says: “Something here doesn’t sit right with me; let’s do it differently.” All geniuses say that the main ideas came to them in dreams, while walking, when they were thinking about something completely unrelated.
You cannot plan a discovery for Wednesday from three to five. You need to have a broad outlook, know a lot of different things because you never know where and which association will “hit” you and lead to a breakthrough in your own field. Impressionist artists saw the world as science could only describe it decades later. They intuitively grasped what logic took a long time to reach. This is our chance: to develop within ourselves what cannot be counted and algorithmized — intuition, imagination, the ability to make mistakes from which a pearl is born.
Man Evgeny – blog author
I lived and studied abroad in New Zealand, taking English language courses. I lived and worked in South Korea in the fields and at sea. In total, I’ve visited four different countries, different from those where Russian is spoken. I’ve interacted with people from at least 20 different cultures, religions, and faiths. I share my experiences on my blog. I try not to judge or make any judgments, but I do draw conclusions.