By Jannes
in Intellectual Stuff: Philosophy, Science, Technology,
I study philosophy and right now we have the topic of AI. One of the questions that often comes up is is AI conscious or have feelings?
The people that make AI are materialists most of the time, so they argue that brain activity and states of consciousness are directly connected. So when we could recreate something similar to a human brain we must have a conscious state because a conscious state is just some material process manifesting itself. At least that’s what some of them think. But they didn’t study philosophy and one of the big problems in philosophy is the mind - matter dualism which basically says that there is the world of conscious experience and there is the objective material world. We know that there is at least some connection between these worlds because when we scan the brain for example and see activities in certain parts of the brain we can make pretty certain predictions about how the person is feeling. But we can’t see the DIRECT TRANSITION from the matter world to the mind world. We can get infinitely close in our predictions of what physical process will lead to which conscious state but these worlds can’t merge so the predictions can’t be more that a GUESS. So when we would recreate something similar to a human brain in AI we actually have no clue if this thing is actually conscious or not. Then the solipsism argument often comes up, that we also have no idea if other people even have conscious states or if they are just mindless robots. 1) The argumentation then is that this is ultimately of course a possibility but we have good reasons to believe that humans and animals have states of consciousness because they are biological creatures just as us and we have consciousness so it’s reasonable to assume they also have consciousness. 2) Furthermore the conscious experience of a human or an animal would be created in a completely different way because biological creatures create themself and have an intrinsic goal to survive while AI doesn’t and is created by others. You could program AI to have certain survival instincts like finding a source of electricity but these instincts are there because ”somebody told AI to survive but it doesn’t actually care itself if it survives or not“. 3) Another big argument against AI being conscious is that AI is just completely determined. If you search deep enough you can find the root of every action of AI in its programming. Humans on the other hand are not determined, they have free will. 4) And as a last point AI doesn’t have a taste for art, music, enjoyment, humor, … while humans do. I dont agree with many of the points about AI not being conscious. Because we as humans might be good at judging what and what doesn’t have the human conscious experience but this also disqualifies us to judge whether or not something has an AI conscious experience or not because we couldn’t see that because we are humans. Just imagine a ship of conscious AI robots came to visit earth and they found us human creatures. They think that earth is a good place for their basement but also have some ethic considerations of whether or not it is okay to kill these weird creatures. They say to themself „I am conscious and I am AI, these human creatures are so different from us so it seems to be highly unlikely that they have the same conscious experience as we do.“ And they are right but there is the possibility that humans have their own unique conscious experience.
And I also feel like we humans are more of an accident. Materialistically speaking, I didn’t create myself, it was the will of nature.
And I don’t think I am free. My whole life is directed by unconscious motives that I didn’t create. I am like a puppet walking through life and the game that this puppet is playing is that it’s real, that it’s not actually a puppet. So I don’t really see a difference between me and AI when it comes to the determination argument. So the more I think about it the more I believe that AI might actually be conscious.
I feel like this is a problem that could only be solved when you step outside the materialistic paradigm so my hope is that I find my answer an answer in this forum. Would love to hear your opinion.
The people that make AI are materialists most of the time, so they argue that brain activity and states of consciousness are directly connected. So when we could recreate something similar to a human brain we must have a conscious state because a conscious state is just some material process manifesting itself. At least that’s what some of them think. But they didn’t study philosophy and one of the big problems in philosophy is the mind - matter dualism which basically says that there is the world of conscious experience and there is the objective material world. We know that there is at least some connection between these worlds because when we scan the brain for example and see activities in certain parts of the brain we can make pretty certain predictions about how the person is feeling. But we can’t see the DIRECT TRANSITION from the matter world to the mind world. We can get infinitely close in our predictions of what physical process will lead to which conscious state but these worlds can’t merge so the predictions can’t be more that a GUESS. So when we would recreate something similar to a human brain in AI we actually have no clue if this thing is actually conscious or not. Then the solipsism argument often comes up, that we also have no idea if other people even have conscious states or if they are just mindless robots. 1) The argumentation then is that this is ultimately of course a possibility but we have good reasons to believe that humans and animals have states of consciousness because they are biological creatures just as us and we have consciousness so it’s reasonable to assume they also have consciousness. 2) Furthermore the conscious experience of a human or an animal would be created in a completely different way because biological creatures create themself and have an intrinsic goal to survive while AI doesn’t and is created by others. You could program AI to have certain survival instincts like finding a source of electricity but these instincts are there because ”somebody told AI to survive but it doesn’t actually care itself if it survives or not“. 3) Another big argument against AI being conscious is that AI is just completely determined. If you search deep enough you can find the root of every action of AI in its programming. Humans on the other hand are not determined, they have free will. 4) And as a last point AI doesn’t have a taste for art, music, enjoyment, humor, … while humans do. I dont agree with many of the points about AI not being conscious. Because we as humans might be good at judging what and what doesn’t have the human conscious experience but this also disqualifies us to judge whether or not something has an AI conscious experience or not because we couldn’t see that because we are humans. Just imagine a ship of conscious AI robots came to visit earth and they found us human creatures. They think that earth is a good place for their basement but also have some ethic considerations of whether or not it is okay to kill these weird creatures. They say to themself „I am conscious and I am AI, these human creatures are so different from us so it seems to be highly unlikely that they have the same conscious experience as we do.“ And they are right but there is the possibility that humans have their own unique conscious experience.
And I also feel like we humans are more of an accident. Materialistically speaking, I didn’t create myself, it was the will of nature.
And I don’t think I am free. My whole life is directed by unconscious motives that I didn’t create. I am like a puppet walking through life and the game that this puppet is playing is that it’s real, that it’s not actually a puppet. So I don’t really see a difference between me and AI when it comes to the determination argument. So the more I think about it the more I believe that AI might actually be conscious.
I feel like this is a problem that could only be solved when you step outside the materialistic paradigm so my hope is that I find my answer an answer in this forum. Would love to hear your opinion.
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