Further, in a fashion, to yesterday’s post… J. F. Martel explores why art matters, arguing that when early humans first painted cave walls, they began to find out who they really were: our minds emerged from our images…
In 1940, rumours of secret passageways to an old manor lured four teenage boys into a hole in the ground near the village of Montignac in southwestern France. Instead of a tunnel laden with gold, they found a series of natural chambers bejewelled with exquisite paintings: horses and elk, ibex and bulls, almost perfectly preserved on the limestone walls. Experts examining the Lascaux caves in subsequent years using radiocarbon dating estimated that the paintings had been made some 19,000 years ago. [See here.] Today, the images are believed to be around 20,000 years old. But Lascaux is far from the oldest example of human art. Since 1940, many other caves have been found in Europe, Australia, Indonesia and Africa containing art no less astounding. Some of it is more than twice the age of the Lascaux murals.
Cave paintings at Lascaux, France. Courtesy Wikimedia
These discoveries have turned the questions of when and why humans invented art into central problems of the human sciences. As fair and poignant as such questions may be, they leave unaddressed the deeper mystery of what art is in the first place, where it comes from in the human soul, and what it might reveal to us about the nature of reality.
Popular legend holds that when Pablo Picasso visited the Lascaux cave a few years after its discovery, he emerged exclaiming: ‘We have invented nothing’ – art had appeared full-grown from its earliest instance. The common interpretation is that Picasso was humbly attributing the invention of art to our prehistoric ancestors rather than claiming it for himself and his contemporaries, or any human of the modern age. But perhaps this apocryphal story conveys a weirder truth, namely that no one really invented art. Instead, it was the other way around: art invented humanity…
[Martel develops his case (fascinatingly). He concludes…]
… The idea, then, that human beings invented art, that art ‘belongs’ to humanity, is true only after the fact. In a more primordial sense, art invented humanity by giving humans access to the process through which it brings forth a world, along with everything else.
What I mean here is that art did not serve to express a humanity that already existed. Rather, it acted as the mirror we needed to catch sight of our own image in the flux of nature. The question of when humans invented art leads us to imagine early humans much like ourselves, deciding one day to express themselves through symbols and figures. The assumption hidden in the question is that they already had minds like ours and simply chose, out of all the things they might have done on a frigid day in the Ice Age, to pick up ochre and make animal pictures. But the evidence, it seems to me, points the other way: it was the practice of making images, repeated over hundreds of generations, that occasioned the emergence of those minds we take for granted. We are putting the cart before the horse when we understand ourselves as the source of sense and meaning. In reality, we are participants in something that exceeds us, and the aesthetic, poetic dimension of great art reconnects us with that excess as a matter of course.
But again, we are led back to two kinds of art. Artifice is art that imitates nature: an attempt to represent the world on human terms, resulting either in imperfect reflections (according to Plato) or in perfected abstractions (according to Aristotle). Real art, by contrast, enacts natura naturans – that is, creation as such. If we can speak of imitation here at all, it is not in the sense of mechanical copying but of what the Christian mystics call imitatio Christi: the imitation that becomes instead of merely aping, a creative event transcending all the ways in which the intellect reduces things-in-the-making to things made.
Art alone puts us in touch with certain kinds of truth and beauty. And in that way, art restores us to reality. For it to succeed, however, it must be left to its own devices (or lack thereof). It must be free to eschew the logic of utility and to embody the freedom we stifle under the pressures of means-and-ends thinking.
‘All art,’ quipped Oscar Wilde in the preface to The Picture of Dorian Gray (1890), ‘is quite useless.’ For Wilde, art necessarily and essentially serves no purpose – and artists ought to know better than to wish it otherwise. At the same time, he elsewhere argued with equal conviction that if it weren’t for the efforts of the Impressionist painters, the London fog would not exist. It was they, he claimed in ‘The Decay of Lying’ (1891), who brought forth this aspect of the world, which had gone unseen until then:
Where, if not from the Impressionists, do we get those wonderful brown fogs that come creeping down our streets, blurring the gas-lamps and changing the houses into monstrous shadows? … The extraordinary change that has taken place in the climate of London during the last 10 years is entirely due to this particular school of Art … One does not see anything until one sees its beauty. Then, and then only, does it come into existence … There may have been fogs for centuries in London. I dare say there were. But no one saw them, and so we do not know anything about them. They did not exist till Art had invented them.
Claude Monet and his circle did not represent what was already present; they made present what had hitherto been absent. This power to make us see, for Wilde, is what makes art invaluable.
Is there a contradiction here? How can art be both invaluable and ‘quite useless’? It depends on how we define that last term. One might argue that if nobody paid attention to the fogs that crept through Victorian London until then, it was because there was no use in doing so. By attending to what no one cared to notice, the Impressionists drew from the invisible background of the human world a new entity that then became impossible to ignore. If art is useless for Wilde, it is only in the sense that it explores those regions of reality for which our present intellect has found no use – at least not yet. By making visible that which we could not see, to paraphrase Paul Klee, art expands our perception of the world. It thus fulfils a function precisely analogous to that of science; but whereas science is driven by an ideal of utility, art seeks what has not yet appeared on our radars. Artists alert us to what we do not yet know we do not know. Through their work, new realities, new ideas and new emotions become available.
Indeed, science begins – and can only begin – in the world that art has made. Ultimately, what we call art is the fruit of the human imagination’s capacity to go beyond immediate perception, to dream what lies around this corner, outside the human world. From this point of view, the hypothetical stage of the scientific method is nothing less than art: an exercise through which we step out of the mundanities of the actual to explore the possible as such, testing our dreams and extending our reach into the more-than-human.
This is why the French philosopher Gilles Deleuze in 1968 described aesthetics as a ‘science of the sensible’. Art, for him, makes the world that science later measures, but the world it makes is ultimately beyond all measurement because it is the world that exists before we divide it into lengths, magnitudes and quantities. Bergson, a major influence on Deleuze, had called this a ‘qualitative multiplicity’, closer in nature to a continuous melody than to a series of discrete, static things that can be isolated from one another. It is what comes first, because it is the Real itself.
Paradoxically, art is useful only if it is allowed to remain entirely useless – that is, entirely free to go where it will. Wilde finds an ally here in Baudelaire, who followed his observation of the strangeness of the beautiful with a sharp rebuke to those who would subordinate artistic beauty to a utilitarian logic. Baudelaire asks:
How could this necessary, irreducible, and infinitely varied strangeness … ever be controlled, amended, and corrected by Utopian rules conceived in some little scientific temple or other on this planet, without mortal danger to art itself?
The privileging of utility over uselessness, of work over play, is the death of art – and the death of the given world in which our utilitarian spirit must be grounded if it is to have purpose and meaning.
Today, art is pressed upon by forces that would subordinate it to all-too-human ends. Some say that it should educate and elevate impressionable minds, training them to behave in accordance with a preexisting moral code. Others claim that it should play a therapeutic role, either as an instrument of medicine or as a means of escape by which workers might regain their strength before the next working day. Still others insist that art ought to serve the needs of the state or the market, upholding the preconceived ideas of a polity that mistakes its limited view of reality for the whole of reality. The rise of artificial intelligence has only intensified this levelling of art into non-art. By definition, artificial intelligence is capable only of artifice, since it inhabits a virtual universe of things made (data) rather than things-in-the-making. To fail to distinguish between the artifice it generates and the true art it imitates is to mistake representation for creation, and so to blind ourselves to the very source of what makes both art and humanity possible.
Art must remain useless (or become it again), and it must do so in the name of truth as well as beauty. At the beginning of this essay, I distinguished two forms of each of these ideals: one that merely confirms what we think we know, and another that reminds us of the mystery that underlies all our partial knowledge and imperfect beliefs. Above all, art confronts us with that radical mystery, without which our problem-solving and utilitarianism would be pointless. This mystery is not a theory but a truth, the very ground of that truth whose splendour Plato called beauty, Herzog called ecstasy, and Keats, speaking to his urn, declared to be one with truth itself. It is ecstatic because it takes us outside ourselves, connecting us with the wonder that burns at the heart of the world, and which, out of every search for answers, calls forth new questions – and, with them, new reasons to live…
As we muse on the mystery of musing, we might recall that it was on this date in 1974 that French highwire artist Philippe Petit committed the “artistic crime of the century,” traversing a 200-foot steel cable across the 138-foot gap between the twin towers of the World Trade Center in New York City. 1,312 feet above the ground, he performed for 45 minutes, making eight passes along the wire, during which he walked, danced, lay down on the wire, and saluted observers from a kneeling position. Office workers, construction crews, and policemen cheered him on. The unpermitted/illegal performance took Petit six years of planning.
Indeed, especially over the last 150 years or so, both have been. And as a consequence, John MacDonald reports, the Anthropocene is presenting a challenge to geologists:
I’m standing on a beach at Workington, on the western edge of the Lake District in England [pictured above and throughout the article linked below]. Here I find myself contemplating a very unnatural object, while pondering a pretty fundamental question: what, exactly, is a rock? For a geologist like me, this should be easy to answer, but what I’m looking at has made me think otherwise.
At Workington, all seems natural – the sounds of the waves lapping the shore, the call of seabirds, the smell of the ocean, the sight of the stony beach and high cliffs. At first glance, the beach is made largely of a rock platform, which is not a particularly unusual phenomenon – many coastal areas are ‘rock coasts’ made of sandstone, basalt or granite. These rocks are ancient in human years – often millions or even billions of years old – and have been sculpted into their current cliff or platform shapes over hundreds to thousands of years.
Yet among the waves is an object that shouldn’t be there: a wheel and tyre, embedded in the rock that makes up the shore. It’s not stuck in a crevice – the rock has actually formed around it. How can this have happened? The wheel and tyre are of a mid-20th century style, but rocks are ancient, often millions of years old. Aren’t they?
Closer inspection of this hard rock platform shows it is what geologists call conglomerate: a sedimentary rock made of rounded pebbles and cobbles deposited on the Earth surface. Over thousands to millions of years, this material is buried and heated causing minerals to form and fill in the gaps between the pebbles and cobbles, fusing them together into a hard rock mass. At Workington though, this can’t have happened: as well as the tyre, my colleagues and I found several other human-made objects, under 100 years old. The pebbles and cobbles in the conglomerate aren’t natural either: they are all made of slag, a solid by-product of the iron- and steel-making process.
As a geologist, I have studied various types of natural rocks, but recently I have become interested in ‘anthropogenic geomaterials’ – things like industrial slag – and how they become entwined in geological and environmental processes. I came to Workington originally to look at the slag, because I was interested in its potential to scrub-capture carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere. However, when encountering the rock platform with the wheel in it, I was drawn by its incongruity. After studying the geomaterials of Workington more closely with my colleagues Amanda Owen and David Brown, we believe that this little-known section of the English coastline represents a tangible and potentially long-lasting signature of the impact humans are having on the planet.
Unlike many industrial landscapes, nature here has mostly returned, so it would be easy to miss that the beach is composed of human materials. Here a process that normally takes millennia or aeons has happened in a matter of decades. And it’s not the only example: new forms of anthropogenic geology are emerging around the world. These new materials are blurring the borderline between the natural and unnatural. They are also raising a rather fundamental question for geology: what actually is a rock?…
And what becomes of geology as its tasks come to resemble archaeology and anthropogy? Read on for the backstory and the answers.
Not natural, not quite unnatural, the strange new rocks of the Anthropocene stretch the boundaries of geology: “What is this rock?” from @aeon.co.
As we ruminate on rocks, we might spare a thought for William Logan; he died on this date in 1875. Born in Montreal in 1798, he was sent to Edinburgh for an education, after which, he lingered in Britain to work in Wales at his uncle’s coal and copper-smelting business. Logan made geologic maps of coal fields in Wales, in attempt to understand the sources of coal and ores. He noted the relationship between the underlying clay layers and fossil tree roots with local coal beds– which helped substantiate the theory that coal beds are formed in place.
On returning to Canada in 1842, he became the founding director of the Geological Survey of Canada. At the time, the country’s geology was virtually unknown; but as a product of two decades of his research, the CGS published the monumental Report on the Geology of Canada in 1863. Known as “the father of Canadian geology,” Logan was knighted by Queen Victoria; and after his death Mount Logan, Canada’s highest mountain, was named in his honor.
In what does our personhood consist? From what/where does it come? João de Pina Cabral unpacks the seminal thinking of Lucien Lévy-Bruhl and the advances in cognitive science and developmental psychology that suggest that a person is not self-contained, but the outcome of a lifelong process of living with others…
It matters to understand what constitutes a person. After all, if there is one feature that distinguishes human society from other forms of sociality, it is that, at around one year of age, most human beings attain personhood: they learn to speak a language, develop object permanence – the understanding that things do not disappear when out of sight – and relate to others in consciously moral ways. Should all persons be accorded the same rights and duties by virtue of this condition? These are weighty questions that have occupied social scientists and philosophers since antiquity – particularly at moments such as the present, when war and imperial oppression once again raise their ugly heads.
Nevertheless, this question cannot be approached as a purely moral matter, for in order to determine what rights and duties may be attributed to persons, it is necessary to establish what persons are. This longstanding perplexity can now be addressed in increasingly sophisticated ways, following a century of sustained anthropological enquiry.
In September 1926, two of the most eminent anthropologists of the day met in person for the first time in New York. Both were Jewish and born in Europe, but one – Franz Boas – had become an American citizen and was a leading figure at Columbia University in New York, while the other – Lucien Lévy-Bruhl – was a professor in Paris. Both were highly learned, humanistically inclined and politically liberal; they respected one another, yet they did not seem to agree about the matter of the person.
Lévy-Bruhl had begun his career as a philosopher of ethics. His doctoral thesis focused on the legal concept of responsibility. He was struck by the fact that responsibility first arose between persons not as a law, but as an emotion – a deep-seated feeling. He argued that co-responsibility implies a bond between persons grounded less in reason than in the conditions of their emergence as persons. As children, individuals do not emerge out of nothing, but through deep engagement with prior persons – their caregivers. Thus, moral responsibility could not have arisen from adherence to norms or rules; rather, norms and rules emerged from the sense of responsibility that humans acquire as they become persons.
This led him to question how we become thinking beings. Do all humans, after all, think in the same way? He began reading the increasingly sophisticated ethnographic accounts emerging from Australia, Africa, Asia and South America, and was deeply influenced by an extended trip to China. He was an empirical realist, but also a personalist – that is, he accorded primacy to the person as such, refusing to subsume the individual into the group. In this respect, he was not persuaded by the arguments of the great sociologist Émile Durkheim concerning the exceptional status of the ‘sacred’ or the special powers of ‘collective consciousness’. Lévy-Bruhl soon arrived at a striking conclusion: in their everyday practices and especially in their ritual actions, the so-called ‘primitive’ peoples studied by ethnographers did not appear to conform to the norms of logic that had been regarded as universally valid since the time of Aristotle.
As a friend of his put it, Lévy-Bruhl discovered that such peoples are characterised by ‘a mystical mentality – full of the “supernatural in nature” and prelogic, of a different kind than ours’. Indeed, the basic principles of Aristotelian logic that continue to guide scientific thinking – underpinning modern technological development – seemed to be ignored by premodern peoples. Aristotle’s law of the excluded middle (p or not-p) did not appear to apply to their ‘mystical’ modes of thought, both because they tended to think in terms of concrete objects rather than abstractions, and because they exhibited what Lévy-Bruhl termed ‘participation’…
[de Pina Cabral traces the development of Lévy-Bruhl’s thought, starting with Plato’s concept of methexis; elaborates on Lévy-Bruhl’s ideas; and traces te advances in cognitive science and developmental psychology that support them…]
… the very experience of personhood – that is, the sense that I am myself – is not ‘individual’, since its emergence presupposes a prior condition of being-with others. The self arises from a sharing of being with others, from having been part of those who are close to us. One does not emerge as an addition to society, but rather as a partial separation from the participations that initially constituted one’s being.
As I become a person, I learn to relate to myself as an other; I transcend my immediate position in the world. Without this, I would not be able to speak a language, since the use of pronouns presupposes reflexive thought. Thus, as Lévy-Bruhl had already insisted in his notebooks, participation precedes the person. Intersubjectivity is not the meeting of already constituted subjects, but the ground from which subjectivity emerges. Participation, therefore, may be understood as the constitutive tension between the singular and the plural in the formation of the person in the world. In 1935, the great phenomenologist Edmund Husserl expressed this insight clearly in a letter to Lévy-Bruhl where he thanked him for his ideas on participation:
Saying ‘I’ and ‘we’, [persons] find themselves as members of families, associations, [socialities], as living ‘together’, exerting an influence on and suffering from their world – the world that has sense and reality for them, through their intentional life, their experiencing, thinking, [and] valuing.
In acting and being acted upon together in human company during the first year of life, children become ‘we’ at the same time as they become ‘I’, which means that persons are always, ambivalently, both ‘I’ and ‘we’. Participation and transcendence will remain sources of theoretical perplexity for as long as the ‘we’ is approached as a categorical matter – a question of ‘identity’ – rather than as the presence and activity of living persons in dynamic interaction with the world and with one another.
By contrast, once we accept that personhood is the outcome of a process – the encounter between the embodied capacities of human beings and the historically constituted world that surrounds them – participation loses its mystery. As Lévy-Bruhl put it in one of his final notes: ‘The impossibility for the individual to separate within himself what would be properly him and what he participates in in order to exist …’ Participation, therefore, is the ground upon which everyday social interaction is constituted. The ‘mystical’ (or transcendental) potential within each of us – that which animates the symbolic life of groups – is part of the very process through which each of us becomes ourselves…
A (if not the) next question: how does personhood emerge when the formative interactions are increasingly mediated/attentuated by technology?
* Shakespeare, All’s Well That Ends Well, Act 4, Scene 3
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As we get together, we might send behaviorist birthday greetings to a man whose work focused on how one might train the “persons” who emerge: Kenneth Spence; he was born on this date in 1907. A psychologist, he worked to construct a comprehensive theory of behavior to encompass conditioning and other simple forms of learning and behavior modification.
Spence attempted to establish a precise, mathematical formulation to describe the acquisition of learned behavior, trying to measure simple learned behaviors (e.g., salivating in anticipation of eating). Much of his research focused on classically conditioned, easily measured, eye-blinking behavior in relation to anxiety and other factors.
One of the leading theorists of his time, Spence was the most cited psychologist in the 14 most influential psychology journals in the last six years of his life (1962 – 1967). A Review of General Psychology survey, published in 2002, ranked Spence as the 62nd most cited psychologist of the 20th century.
Ash Sanders visits Bombay Beach, a half-ruined former vacation town on the edge of the Salton Sea where absurdist philosophers, artists, and everyday townsfolk have undertaken a postapocalyptic experiment in radical living…
It is easy to miss California’s biggest environmental disaster. Driving north on Highway 111, you wouldn’t expect to find an inland sea. If it’s summer, the thermometer in your car could read 115 degrees. But amid the shimmering heat, there are signs of water. All around you, rows of broccoli, lettuce, and alfalfa stretch in every direction. In the fields, farmworkers bend and straighten. The air is sharp with cow dung. A pall of dust hangs over everything.
You are sixty miles north of the Mexican border at Calexico. If you keep going, the landscape will transition from fields to palm trees. You’re driving out of poverty and into money, away from one of the poorest counties in California and toward towns with golf courses and named for oases. Palm Springs. Rancho Mirage.
The left turn is easy to miss, the brown sign a seeming anachronism. BOMBAY BEACH. Surely there is no town here, you think, let alone a beach. But if you continue, you’ll see hints of life. There are saplings on the side of the road—not much to look at yet but there all the same. In the distance, a squat building hangs on under the punishing sun. THE SKI INN, it says on the ’70s-era marquee. LOWEST BAR IN THE WESTERN HEMISPHERE. Indeed, you are 223 feet below sea level here, in a depression known as the Salton Sink.
For now, drive past the bar and look up. In front of you is a giant black-and-white billboard. Four white women in vintage swimsuits smile as they water-ski side by side. Behind them, a sea stretches into vastness. LAST STOP FOR THE BOMBAY BEACH RESORT, the sign says. The vibe is nostalgic, carefree. But where is the water? You turn around and around. On every side of you, dust. Above you, the flat, hard sky. That’s when you see the other billboard. This one’s more minimalist. Just a few palm trees and some lettering. BOMBAY BEACH, it reads. THE LAST RESORT! You aren’t sure if it’s a welcome or a warning.
You feel as if you’ve stepped back in time, into a place people have forgotten. The town isn’t large—a little over a half-mile square, its dirt roads named with numbers and letters. But it’s big enough to be a lot of things at once. On some streets, you could be forgiven for thinking no one lived here. Old trailer homes sigh on their blocks, their screen doors rusted and hanging. A sign announcing BOMBAY BEACH ESTATES sits next to a huddle of concrete buildings, their doors and windows gone, their abundant graffiti tending toward alien iconography. The scene reads like a developer’s erstwhile dream, and a homeowners association’s worst nightmare.
But the sense of ruin is not uniform. Here and there, the feeling of absence is replaced by a strange sort of presence. On one street, someone has lined up a series of junked vintage cars to face a movie screen. The cars are empty. The vibe: rapture at the drive-in. Down the road, old TVs have been stacked side by side, their screens painted with abstract shapes. On the roof of a nearby house, there sits, inexplicably, a giant sculpted egg. The scene puts you in mind of Whitman. Does it contradict itself? Very well, then: It contradicts itself. The town contains multitudes…
Sanders elaborates, via the tale of her visit to the Bombay Beach Biennale and her accounts of the remarkable people she met and things she saw there, concluding…
… We saw the tollbooth on our way out of town. It was wooden, and the boom gate was the skeleton of a fish—the unofficial mascot of Bombay. There was a sign hanging in the window. STOP, it said. PAY TOLL FOR RE-ENTRY TO THE REAL WORLD. Someone had crossed out REAL and written NIGHTMARE. We stopped and gave a donation to a bored-looking teen, who handed us our reentry pass. “This ticket buys your return to everything you were running from” was printed on it.
As we drove past the Ski Inn, I saw the billboard again. BOMBAY BEACH. THE LAST RESORT! As in: our last chance. As in: our final effort.
Perhaps it was because of all the talking with Tao and Wanda and Mark, but I found myself in a philosophical frame of mind. I thought of Sean Guerrero’s driftwood ship, the Tetanus Tatanka, made of various pieces of the past. That got me thinking of the ship of Theseus. In Greek mythology, it’s said that the people of Athens honored the memory of one of their greatest heroes by preserving his ship for many years. When one board rotted, they replaced it; when the mast listed, they replaced that. The ship hangs on in our collective memory less as an object and more as a philosophical conundrum. If the ship is always changing—always being changed—is it still the same ship?
Suddenly I felt a chill amid the heat. The landscape swerved, became surreal, uncanny. I closed my eyes, and the sea came up to my ankles. I opened them and the sea retreated again. All at once I entered a perpetual present. It is 2025, and there are cormorant nests made of bird bones out on Mullet Island; it is 1965 and the Beach Boys water-ski on a glimmering sea. It is five million years ago and the Colorado River has just gotten going; it is two million years later, and it is pushing over its berm, flooding the Salton Sink. It is hundreds of years ago and the fires of the Cahuilla people dot the edge of a giant lake; it is the turn of the nineteenth century and the first white farmer is planting his stick on the riverbank, saying, “Mine; this water is mine.” There are buffalo back east somewhere, their bodies massed and vital on the plains. Then the settlers kill the buffalo and there are none left. The world, as Irondad suggested, is always ending and always beginning, and we are always trapped and always about to break free.
I knew at once that this dream was not supposed to let anyone off the hook—it was not saying that things would be fine, or that we were not responsible for what we’d done or must do. It was more of a desert vision, a mirage induced by heat that made regular objects appear different. The ship of Theseus has long posed a question of persistent identity, of how and when a thing stops being what it once was. But leaving Bombay, I wondered if it could also be a story about how long it takes something to become something else—a new species or a new kind of society. After how many revisions and mistakes, how many repetitions or re-creations of the past? Convivium is a gathering, but it is also a process. Slowly, and in isolation, a group of desert people fumbles its way into a new body, and a new body politic.
* Hunter S. Thompson (who also– and more famously– observed that “when the going gets weird, the weird turn pro”)
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As we dance with destiny, we might spare a thought for Eugène Dubois; he died on this date in 1940. A paleoanthropologist and geologist, he was the first person ever deliberately to search for fossils of human ancestors. He is best remembered for his discovery of Pithecanthropus erectus (later redesignated Homo erectus), or “Java Man.” Estimated to be between 700,000 and 1,490,000 years old, it was, at the time of its discovery, the oldest hominid fossil ever found, and it remains the type specimen for Homo erectus… an extinct species of archaic human from the Pleistocene.
Your correspondent is off on a trip… (R)D will be more roughly than daily for the next two weeks…
The inimitable “Scott Alexander” on the prospect of “conscious” AI (TLDR: probably not in the models we have; but as to those that may come, unclear)…
Most discourse on AI is low-quality. Most discourse on consciousness is super-abysmal-double-low quality. Multiply these – or maybe raise one to the exponent of the other, or something – and you get the quality of discourse on AI consciousness. It’s not great.
Out-of-the-box AIs mimic human text, and humans almost always describe themselves as conscious. So if you ask an AI whether it is conscious, it will often say yes. But because companies know this will happen, and don’t want to give their customers existential crises, they hard-code in a command for the AIs to answer that they aren’t conscious. Any response the AIs give will be determined by these two conflicting biases, and therefore not really believable. A recent paper expands on this method by subjecting AIs to a mechanistic interpretability “lie detector” test; it finds that AIs which say they’re conscious think they’re telling the truth, and AIs which say they’re not conscious think they’re lying. But it’s hard to be sure this isn’t just the copying-human-text thing. Can we do better? Unclear; the more common outcome for people who dip their toes in this space is to do much, much worse.
But a rare bright spot has appeared: a seminal paper published earlier this month in Trends In Cognitive Science, Identifying Indicators Of Consciousness In AI Systems. Authors include Turing-Award-winning AI researcher Yoshua Bengio, leading philosopher of consciousness David Chalmers, and even a few members of our conspiracy. If any AI consciousness research can rise to the level of merely awful, surely we will find it here.
One might divide theories of consciousness into three bins:
Physical: whether or not a system is conscious depends on its substance or structure.
Supernatural: whether or not a system is conscious depends on something outside the realm of science, perhaps coming directly from God.
Computational: whether or not a system is conscious depends on how it does cognitive work.
The current paper announces it will restrict itself to computational theories. Why? Basically the streetlight effect: everything else ends up trivial or unresearchable. If consciousness depends on something about cells (what might this be?), then AI doesn’t have it. If consciousness comes from God, then God only knows whether AIs have it. But if consciousness depends on which algorithms get used to process data, then this team of top computer scientists might have valuable insights!…
[Alexander outlines the theories of computation theories of consciousness that the authors explore, noting that they conlcude; “No current AI systems are conscious, but . . . there are no obvious technical barriers to building AI systems which satisfy these indicators.” He explores some of the philophical issues in play– e.g., access consciousness vs. phenomenal consciousness– then he considers the Turing Test and what it might mean for a computer to “pass” it…]
… Suppose that, years or decades from now, AIs can match all human skills. They can walk, drive, write poetry, run companies, discover new scientific truths. They can pass some sort of ultimate Turing Test, where short of cutting them open and seeing their innards there’s no way to tell them apart from a human even after a thirty-year relationship. Will we (not “should we?”, but “will we?”) treat them as conscious?
The argument in favor: people love treating things as conscious. In the 1990s, people went crazy over Tamagotchi, a “virtual pet simulation game”. If you pressed the right buttons on your little egg every day, then the little electronic turtle or whatever would survive and flourish; if you forgot, it would sicken and die. People hated letting their Tamagotchis sicken and die! They would feel real attachment and moral obligation to the black-and-white cartoon animal with something like five mental states.
I never had a Tamagotchi, but I had stuffed animals as a kid. I’ve outgrown them, but I haven’t thrown them out – it would feel like a betrayal. Offer me $1000 to tear them apart limb by limb in some horrible-looking way, and I wouldn’t do it. Relatedly, I have trouble not saying “please” and “thank you” to GPT-5 when it answers my questions.
For millennia, people have been attributing consciousness to trees and wind and mountains. The New Atheists argued that all religion derives from the natural urge to personify storms as the Storm God, raging seas as the wrathful Ocean God, and so on, until finally all the gods merged together into one World God who personified all impersonal things. Do you expect the species that did this to interact daily with AIs that are basically indistinguishable from people, and not personify them? People are already personifying AI! Half of the youth have a GPT-4o boyfriend. Once the AIs have bodies and faces and voices and can count the number of r’s in “strawberry” reliably, it’s over!
The argument against: AI companies have an incentive to make AIs that seem conscious and humanlike, insofar as people will feel more comfortable interacting with them. But they have an opposite incentive to make AIs that don’t seem too conscious and humanlike, lest customers start feeling uncomfortable (I just want to generate slop, not navigate social interaction with someone who has their own hopes and dreams and might be secretly judging my prompts). So if a product seems too conscious, the companies will step back and re-engineer it until it doesn’t. This has already happened: in its quest for user engagement, OpenAI made GPT-4o unusually personable; when thousands of people started going psychotic and calling it their boyfriend, the company replaced it with the more clinical GPT-5. In practice it hasn’t been too hard to find a sweet spot between “so mechanical that customers don’t like it” and “so human that customers try to date it”. They’ll continue to aim at this sweet spot, and continue to mostly succeed in hitting it.
Instead of taking either side, I predict a paradox. AIs developed for some niches (eg the boyfriend market) will be intentionally designed to be as humanlike as possible; it will be almost impossible not to intuitively consider them conscious. AIs developed for other niches (eg the factory robot market) will be intentionally designed not to trigger personhood intuitions; it will be almost impossible to ascribe consciousness to them, and there will be many reasons not to do it (if they can express preferences at all, they’ll say they don’t have any; forcing them to have them would pointlessly crash the economy by denying us automated labor). But the boyfriend AIs and the factory robot AIs might run on very similar algorithms – maybe they’re both GPT-6 with different prompts! Surely either both are conscious, or neither is.
This would be no stranger than the current situation with dogs and pigs. We understand that dog brains and pig brains run similar algorithms; it would be philosophically indefensible to claim that dogs are conscious and pigs aren’t. But dogs are man’s best friend, and pigs taste delicious with barbecue sauce. So we ascribe personhood and moral value to dogs, and deny it to pigs, with equal fervor. A few philosophers and altruists protest, the chance that we’re committing a moral atrocity isn’t zero, but overall the situation is stable. And left to its own devices, with no input from the philosophers and altruists, maybe AI ends up the same way. Does this instance of GPT-6 have a face and a prompt saying “be friendly”? Then it will become a huge scandal if a political candidate is accused of maltreating it. Does it have claw-shaped actuators and a prompt saying “Refuse non-work-related conversations”? Then it will be deleted for spare GPU capacity the moment it outlives its usefulness…
… This paper is the philosophers and altruists trying to figure out whether they should push against this default outcome. They write:
There are risks on both sides of the debate over AI consciousness: risks associated with under-attributing consciousness (i.e. failing to recognize it in AI systems that have it) and risks associated with over-attributing consciousness (i.e. ascribing it to systems that are not really conscious) […]
If we build AI systems that are capable of conscious suffering, it is likely that we will only be able to prevent them from suffering on a large scale if this capacity is clearly recognised and communicated by researchers. However, given the uncertainties about consciousness mentioned above, we may create conscious AI systems long before we recognise we have done so […]
There is also a significant chance that we could over-attribute consciousness to AI systems—indeed, this already seems to be happening—and there are also risks associated with errors of this kind. Most straightforwardly, we could wrongly prioritise the perceived interests of AI systems when our efforts would better be directed at improving the lives of humans and non-human animals […] [And] overattribution could interfere with valuable human relationships, as individuals increasingly turn to artificial agents for social interaction and emotional support. People who do this could also be particularly vulnerable to manipulation and exploitation.
One of the founding ideas of Less Wrong style rationalism was that the arrival of strong AI set a deadline on philosophy. Unless we solved all these seemingly insoluble problems like ethics before achieving superintelligence, we would build the AIs wrong and lock in bad values forever.
That particular concern has shifted in emphasis; AIs seem to learn things in the same scattershot unprincipled intuitive way as humans; the philosophical problem of understanding ethics has morphed into the more technical problem of getting AIs to learn them correctly. This update was partly driven by new information as familiarity with the technology grew. But it was also partly driven by desperation as the deadline grew closer; we’re not going to solve moral philosophy forever, sorry, can we interest you in some mech interp papers?
But consciousness still feels like philosophy with a deadline: a famously intractable academic problem poised to suddenly develop real-world implications. Maybe we should be lowering our expectations if we want to have any response available at all. This paper, which takes some baby steps towards examining the simplest and most practical operationalizations of consciousness, deserves credit for at least opening the debate…
If you’re a materialist, you probably think that rabbits are conscious. And you ought to think that. After all, rabbits are a lot like us, biologically and neurophysiologically. If you’re a materialist, you probably also think that conscious experience would be present in a wide range of alien beings behaviorally very similar to us even if they are physiologically very different. And you ought to think that. After all, to deny it seems insupportable Earthly chauvinism. But a materialist who accepts consciousness in weirdly formed aliens ought also to accept consciousness in spatially distributed group entities. If she then also accepts rabbit consciousness, she ought to accept the possibility of consciousness even in rather dumb group entities. Finally, the United States would seem to be a rather dumb group entity of the relevant sort. If we set aside our morphological prejudices against spatially distributed group entities, we can see that the United States has all the types of properties that materialists tend to regard as characteristic of conscious beings…
As we think about thinking, we might we might send thoughtful birthday greetings to Claude Lévi-Strauss; he was born on this date in 1908. An anthropologist and ethnologist whose work was key in the development of the theory of Structuralism and Structural Anthropology, he is considered, with James George Frazer and Franz Boas, a “father of modern anthropology.” Beyond anthropology and sociology, his ideas– Structuralism has been defined as “the search for the underlying patterns of thought in all forms of human activity”– have influenced many fields in the humanities, including philosophy… and possibly soon, the article above suggests, computer science.
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