Four Modes Of Consciousness

Because a passage in Poul Anderson's "The Trouble Twisters" reminded me of a passage in CS Lewis' Perelandra, we will compare four modes of consciousness:

ordinary human conscious;
contemplative human consciousness;
Anderson's AI, "Muddlehead";
Lewis' "eldila."

Human beings can both counteract negative aspects of familiar consciousness by meditative practice and imagine diverse nonhuman consciousnesses. In fact, some people either vividly imagine or literally encounter gods, fairies, angels etc while authors like Anderson write fiction about them.

By an AI or "artificial intelligence," I mean a self-conscious and intelligent artifact, not a computer programmed to respond as if it were intelligent. Of course, Muddlehead is described not as an artificial brain but as a conscious computer but we have addressed this issue before. See Philosophy And Fiction.

Eldila:

are based on Biblical angels;
do not eat, breed, breathe or die;
inhabit space;
regard planets as moving points;
resemble faint pillars of light;
are of indistinguishable color and at a strange angle to the horizontal.

Both Muddlehead and an eldil are inorganic.

Asking if he gets bored, Muddlehead replies:

"'I am not constructed to feel tedium. The rational faculty of me remains automatically active, analyzing data. When no fresh data are on hand, I rehearse the logical implications of the rules of poker.'" (p. 169)

We gather from this that:

Muddlehead's consciousness remains at the rational/analytic/intellectual level;
he cannot stop analyzing - it is automatic;
he analyzes data where they exist and poker where they do not;
he cannot find this tedious.

By contrast, an eldil just consciously exists, perhaps like a practiced meditator. See Adzel On Earth.