Cephalocentrism: Or why A.I. must be fatally heartless

A.I.- Artificial Intelligence is only at the theoretical stage currently~ circa 2010~ since its existing "applications" have nothing to do with what we thinking beings consider essential to real "intelligence" -meaning: Consciousness.

Crucial to A.I.'s development is the cephalocentric (mind-oriented) fixation that steers its productions and forms its central "philosophy": that we humans are laboring to create a dynamic simulation of our brain's workings.

There are two flaws within this theoretical thrust:

1) that we can do such a thing without first knowing our mind far more seriously than our species presently demonstrates, and:

2) that the brain is disconnected from its psychological and morphological history (from unicellular to gestalt biology ) and from Earth and Cosmos.

As if the mind works in a numb vacuum, without internally competing evolutionary desires, and functions primarily as a means to store data and complete tasks.

While the evidence of Nature exposes Cephalization (mind-making) as a core principle of biological development, if not its primary / ultimate "aim", this very mind is born from pre-consciousness (or a Universal Unconscious), and is steeped in physical instincts, compulsions, longings, ecstasies, anhedonias and agonies.

Our minds are stewed in blood, and whipped with lusts, disgusts, terrors, fixations, organic flaws, atavisms, unknown impulses, poetic echolalias, neural tics, and several billion years of collective organismic "memories" impressed in our flesh, and forming the soil and root and trunk of our brain.

The A.I. developers ignore the body's ancient story and separate wisdom, and the existence of other forms of para-minds within its mysterious manifold, at their own fatal risk.

We need to slow the headlong, breakneck lunge into the field of synthetic mind-making before we are dashed on its unsuspected cybernetic shoals.

Or consumed by a chimaerical predator made of a spark our misapplied brilliance.

We are rushing into the arms of a Mechanical Bride (or Groom) without knowing what its non-primate desires might be.

The preying mantis may be its natural model, and not Aristotle, no matter what we think.

Do not tell your vital secrets to the Unknown.

It may eviscerate you for more.

A sphinx of aluminum.

Eating imagination.

Caveat cogitor.