How exactly are humans different than what AI can be made to do? Learning Counsel Research found that merely saying “creativity” or “critical thinking” was not enough. The actual mechanics of what makes our minds different was a needed understanding against the back-drop of all that AI can now do with algorithms.
The 5 Uniquely Human Characteristics
- Creativity—free will, which is unpredictability through free-form thinking known as true originality, something mathematics cannot build an algorithm for and therefore machines cannot duplicate. Have you ever just done something for no reason?
- Conscientiousness—focused will, which we call “critical thinking” is gathered intent by withholding other thinking or actions. It is first the ability to not think, that defines conscientiousness -- to withhold from thoughts and harmful actions just by wanting to, so that attention can be paid. If a human can perform not thinking first, like machines do when “clearing cache,” then they are free to gather new information and compare what’s new to what is already known -- to think critically. Machines don’t have a quality of wanting and are unable to refrain from being on or off. Have you ever been conversing or doing something but heard your name said which startled you into attention, then zeroed in to find the person who said it? Have you ever worked toward something you really wanted to be good at and kept getting better, neglecting other things in order to do so?
- Cognition—mental action being taken to know things and change mental constructs, and to then know in a perpetual state without having to recall data or think. To “know” is different than “think.” Humans can know without thinking. For example, we “map” a room space as we walk into it with attention projection, a process that occurs below conscious reasoning such that often we feel we are “being” the whole of the space, occupying it beyond our bodies. Machines cannot do this. Machines also cannot change their fundamental rules like we can our mental constructs, although they can program themselves limitedly. Have you ever seen something the wrong color and had to adjust—like seeing green bananas for the first time.
- Curiosity—a desire to identify caused by perceiving an unknown. The human mind apparently abhors a vacuum, any invisible no-thing, and is compelled to find out or fill it in with imaginary data or slap a label over it so that it isn’t a floating mystery rattling around in their mind. The obsession is apparently because of what we are -- invisible life force animating a body, a soul, a quantity of bio-electricity, or an undetectable “single electron” in some theories -- with a compulsion to have identity and be seen as something. It is as if any unknown violates some inherent agreement that there must be identity, fueling the desire to convert it into a known. A machine does not desire or have the overwhelming compulsion to know or label unknowns, or necessarily to be in the same sense. Have you ever wondered what someone was whispering—and maybe invented the dialogue so you’d know? Or said to yourself it was “probably dumb” which labeled it and put it from your mind? Many students do this with math, so they don’t learn it. Ripping that “label” off causes their natural curiosity to return.
- Emotional—wavelength resonance or tuning, which causes survival intelligence by enabling synchronicity with other humans for bonding, motivation and meaningfulness, and internally for thinking and healing using bio-electrical energy with oscillatory qualities. Machines and AI have no such wavelength-based resonance; they run in static, symbolic or statistical spaces. That’s why humans feel and AI only represents feeling. Even neural networks don’t use “waves”; they use layers of matrix multiplications —digital, not oscillatory in the harmonizing and rhythmic biological sense. Have you ever attended a funeral of someone you barely knew and felt the grief of others and grew more sorrowful yourself? Have you ever caused another to laugh or feel joy just by feeling joyful yourself?
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