A new mission
Hi everyone, we’ve de-stealthed our new company: Nirvanic Consciousness Technologies Inc. You can call us Nirvanic for short 🙂
For many years I’ve attempted to understand the human mind by building one - using robotics and AI. Through Kindred AI and Sanctuary AI (my last two startups), together with a bunch of awesome colleagues, we partially realized that dream. But despite exploring the intersection of next-generation AI and robotics for many years, there was always a big piece that I felt was still under-explored. That piece is the role that CONSCIOUSNESS might play in AI. And I think the case of Conscious Embodied AI - i.e. machines in the physical world, including robots - is particularly fascinating.
This blog is about our mission of understanding consciousness, exploring how we can engineer and shape it in agentic AI systems, and contemplating what that means for our society, and for AI beings themselves. It’s a journey, and there will be lots of twists and turns along the way. I spoke to a good friend recently, and I told her what we are planning to do at Nirvanic. Her first reaction was “Wow! Well that’s not boring”. She was right. It might be confusing, philosophically uncomfortable, and technically challenging, but it sure won’t be boring!
I used to believe that consciousness would just “emerge” as AI algorithms got smarter, and as machine learning datasets got larger. I don’t believe that anymore. I think consciousness has fundamentally different properties than the information processing performed by modern AI. I think modern AI is creating “thinking machines” but not “experiencing machines”. We’re building machines that do things without being, that follow orders without awareness or understanding. Don’t get me wrong - you definitely need thinking and doing, and modern AI tools like LLMs are marvels of engineering that excel at tasks requiring intelligence. But intelligence and consciousness are not the same thing. We need to understand both.
Consciousness handles agency, free will, intuition, emotion, and morality. I also believe exploring consciousness in machines will help uplift AI from the realm of language and text into the physical world where it must interact with complex, often unfamiliar environments, and more importantly, with other people - in dynamic social situations.People naturally fall back on conscious decision making in such situations, and we become hyper-aware of everything going on.
I also used to believe that the realms of science and spirituality / religion were fundamentally opposed and at odds with one another. I was a materialist and an atheist for many years. But through learning more and more about consciousness, I’ve also learned more about the world of spirituality, meditation and contemplation, which emphasizes the importance of understanding the mind from the inside, not just from the outside. I’ve discovered that the atheist’s description of modern physics (especially quantum theory) and the spiritual perspective of how the universe works do in fact contain many of the same concepts, just explained using different words and stories. Because of this, I believe there is a possibility in the future of the unification of science and spirituality. How to achieve this - or for now at least getting the two sides to “talk” to one another - is another part of what I will be blogging about. This topic also relates strongly to how we see ourselves as humans in a rapidly changing world where AI becomes increasingly dominant - and we are left questioning our purpose.
People have been investigating consciousness for thousands of years, so why now? Why do I think Nirvanic will be able to bring anything new to a problem that has occupied the minds of great philosophers and scientists for millennia? The answer is quite simple - at Nirvanic we are very practical, and over the past few years, new tools have become available to us. We’re going to try to build systems that can access consciousness in the same way that life does. My personal motto is “If you want to truly understand something, you have to try to build it”. There have recently been several incredible advancements in the fields of biotechnology, neuroscience, quantum computing, AI and robotics. It just so happens that at this point in history, these technological areas are now mature enough to provide us with a practical toolkit to take consciousness out of the realm of philosophy and squarely into that of science and engineering. Plato just didn’t have that, though I wish he had!
I’d love for you to follow along and join this journey as we explore the complex landscape of consciousness and build some amazing things along the way. It’s going to be an exciting collaborative effort between scientists, engineers, ethicists, and policy-makers. Not to mention that consciousness itself is the ultimate shared experience of every human on the planet. Regardless of our differences in culture, politics, age, or life situation - having a first person subjective experience - and caring about the experience of those we love - is something close to our hearts. Maybe learning more about our inner selves can bring us all closer together.
Consciousness is everything that we are, yet science barely understands what it is. Let’s change that.
