Posts Tagged ‘consciousness’
“Not to extinguish our free will, I hold it to be true that Fortune is the arbiter of one-half of our actions, but that she still leaves us to direct the other half”*…
Further to an earlier post about the latest installment of an age old debate– the “dialogue” on free will vs. Determinism between Robert Sapolsky (determinist) and Kevin Mitchell (champion of free will)– the (remarkable) George Scialabba weighs in…
In 1884, William James began his celebrated essay “The Dilemma of Determinism” by begging his readers’ indulgence: “A common opinion prevails that the juice has ages ago been pressed out of the free-will controversy, and that no new champion can do more than warm up stale arguments which everyone has heard.” James persisted and rendered the subject very juicy, as he always did. But if the topic appeared exhausted to most people then, surely a hundred and forty years later there can’t be anything new to say. Whole new fields of physics, biology, mathematics, and medicine have been invented—surely this ancient philosophical question doesn’t still interest anyone?
Indeed, it does; it retains for many what James called “the most momentous importance.” Like other hardy perennials—the objectivity of “good”; the universality of truth; the existence of human nature and its telos—it continues to fascinate philosophers and laypersons, who agree only that the stakes are enormous: “our very humanity,” many of them insist.
Why so momentous? Skepticism about free will is said to produce two disastrous but opposed states of mind. The first is apathy: We are bound to be so demoralized by the conviction that nothing is up to us, that we are not the captains of our fate, that we need no longer get out of bed. The other is frenzy: We will be so exhilarated by our liberation from responsibility and guilt that we will run amok, like Dostoevsky’s imagined atheist, who concludes that if God does not exist, everything is permitted.
Note that it is not the absence of free will but only the absence of belief in free will that is said to have these baneful effects. People who never give the subject a thought are neither apathetic nor frenetic, at least not for these reasons. Should we just stop thinking about the whole question?
For twenty-five hundred years, no generation has succeeded in doing that: So we may as well wade in. What is free will? It is the capacity to make uncaused choices. This does not mean that nothing causes my choice—it means that I do. But surely something has caused me to be the person who makes that choice. And doesn’t whatever causes me to be the person I am also cause the choices I make?…
[Scialabba succinctly explicates Sapolsky’s and Mitchell’s (each, estimable) arguments…]
… But are beliefs about free will really the point here? Judges, whether or not they believe in free will, should take more cognizance of mitigating circumstances than they do now. A baby damaged by prenatal cocaine exposure who grows up to be an addict and petty thief deserves mercy; a billionaire whose tax evasion robs his fellow citizens of tens of millions of dollars deserves none. But no philosophical convictions are needed to arrive at these conclusions, only humanity and good sense.
And whether or not we have free will, isn’t punishment also justified as deterrence? Surely, the prospect of a long stretch in prison (or quarantine) would give pause to at least some murderers, rapists, and persons scheming to overturn a fair presidential election? And beyond that, punishment serves as a public affirmation of the values of a family or society. We are embodied beings: Values cannot only be preached; they must sometimes be enforced.
At a certain point, one may ask, what is really at stake in this debate? Sapolsky appears to harbor no metaphysical designs on readers; he spins his intricate, ingenious causal webs only, in the end, to enlarge our sympathy for life’s failures. Mitchell does seem to have a humanity-affirming philosophical agenda. “You are the type of thing that can take action, that can make decisions, that can be a causal force in the world: You are an agent,” he often reminds the reader, implying that these are things a scientific materialist must, in strict logic, deny. But I strongly doubt that any scientific materialist anywhere in the multiverse would deny that she can take action, make decisions, or be a causal force, or that she is an agent, or does things for reasons. She might, though, think that all her choices are caused, which, Sapolsky would say, is perfectly compatible with taking actions, making decisions, being a causal force, or acting for reasons. Elsewhere, Mitchell warns readers not to believe anyone (presumably the insidious scientific materialist) who suggests that we are merely “a collection of atoms pushed around by the laws of physics.” To which our scientific materialist might reply that we are indeed very highly organized collections of atoms, molecules, nerves, muscles, and hundreds of other components, pushed and pulled by the laws of physics, chemistry, biology, neuroscience, psychology, sociology, economics, and politics, along with intimations from philosophy, history, and art, and constantly adjusting to and modifying those influences from a center that is provisionally but not permanently stable. This, she would say, is how one can be an agent without free will.
With what I hope is due deference, I humbly disagree with both Sapolsky and Mitchell, and even with my deeply revered William James. Perhaps the question of free will is not so momentous. Philosophers have been debating about it for thousands of years, Mitchell observes. “That these debates continue today with unabated fervor tells you that they have not yet resolved the issue.” Indeed, they haven’t. Perhaps they should take a break. Perhaps it is a controversy without consequences. Perhaps whether we are free or fated, morality and politics, science and medicine, art and literature will all go their merry or melancholy ways, unaffected.
Notwithstanding Sapolsky’s hopes and Mitchell’s fears, whatever we decide about free will, the world—even the moral world—will look the same afterward as before. This, along with our millennia-long failure to make appreciable, or any, progress toward an answer, suggests that we are in the presence of a pseudoproblem. James himself, in “The Will to Believe,” written a dozen years after he defended free will in “The Dilemma of Determinism,” conceded that “free will and simple wishing do seem, in the matter of our credences, to be only fifth wheels to the coach.” The moral and political worlds run—to the extent they run at all—on generosity and imagination, mother wit and sympathetic understanding. These can answer all our questions about moral responsibility and moral obligation without our having to solve the insoluble conundrums of free will.
A new round in an old debate: “Free at Last?,” from @hedgehogreview.
* Niccolò Machiavelli, The Prince
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As we wrestle with responsibility, we might spare a thought for Henri-Louis Bergson; he died on this date in 1941. A philosopher especially influential in the first half of the 20th Century, Bergson convinced many of the primacy of immediate experience and intuition over rationalism and science for the understanding of reality…. many, but not Wittgenstein, Russell, Moore, nor Santayana, who thought that he willfully misunderstood the scientific method in order to justify his “projection of subjectivity onto the physical world.” Still, in 1927 Bergson won the Nobel Prize (in Literature); and in 1930, received France’s highest honor, the Grand-Croix de la Legion d’honneur.
Bergson’s influence waned mightily later in the century. To the extent that there’s been a bit of a resurgence of interest, it’s largely the result, in philosophical circles, of Gilles Deleuze’s appropriation of Bergson’s concept of “mulitplicity” and his treatment of duration, which Deleuze used in his critique of Hegel’s dialectic, and in the religious and spiritualist studies communities, of Bergson’s seeming embrace of the concept of an overriding/underlying consciousness in which humans participate.
Indeed, Time and Free Will: An Essay on the Immediate Data of Consciousness, Bergson’s doctoral thesis, first published in 1889, dealt explicitly with the question we’re considering, which Bergson argued is merely a common confusion among philosophers caused by an illegitimate translation of the unextended into the extended– the introduction of his theory of duration.
“I was conscious that I knew practically nothing”*…
The estimable Nicholas Carr observes that “you don’t make friends by telling people they’re not as smart as they think they are. And you definitely don’t make friends by telling all of humanity that it’s not as smart as it thinks it is. That’s why the philosophical school of Mysterianism has never caught on with the public.” As an amateur Mysterian himself, he reprises a 2017 essay to spread the good word…
By leaps, steps, and stumbles, science progresses. Its seemingly inexorable advance promotes a sense that everything can be known and will be known. Through observation and experiment, and lots of hard thinking, we will come to explain even the murkiest and most complicated of nature’s secrets: consciousness, dark matter, time, the origin and fate of the universe.
But what if our faith in nature’s knowability is just an illusion, a trick of the overconfident human mind? That’s the working assumption behind a school of thought known as Mysterianism. Situated at the fruitful if sometimes fraught intersection of scientific and philosophic inquiry, the Mysterianist view has been promulgated, in different ways, by many prominent thinkers, from the philosopher Colin McGinn to the linguist Noam Chomsky to the cognitive scientist Steven Pinker. The Mysterians propose that human intellect has boundaries and that many of the mysteries of the cosmos will forever lie beyond our comprehension.
Mysterianism is most closely associated with the so-called hard problem of consciousness: How can the inanimate matter of the brain produce subjective feelings? The Mysterians suggest that the human mind is incapable of understanding itself, that we will never know how consciousness works. But if Mysterianism applies to the workings of the mind, there’s no reason it shouldn’t also apply to the workings of nature in general. As McGinn has suggested, “It may be that nothing in nature is fully intelligible to us.”
The simplest and best argument for Mysterianism is founded on evolutionary evidence. When we examine any other living creature, we understand immediately that its intellect is limited. Even the brightest, most curious dog is not going to master arithmetic. Even the wisest of owls knows nothing of the physiology of the field mouse it devours. If all the minds that evolution has produced have bounded comprehension, then it’s only logical that our own minds, also products of evolution, would have limits as well. As Pinker has put it, “The brain is a product of evolution, and just as animal brains have their limitations, we have ours.” To assume that there are no limits to human understanding is to believe in a level of human exceptionalism that seems miraculous, if not mystical.
Mysterianism, it’s important to emphasize, is not inconsistent with materialism [with theism or idealism]. The Mysterians don’t suggest that what’s unknowable has to be spiritual or otherwise otherworldly. They posit that matter itself has complexities that lie beyond our ken. Like every other animal on earth, we humans are just not smart enough to understand all of nature’s laws and workings.
What’s truly disconcerting about Mysterianism is that, if our intellect is bounded, we can never know how much of existence lies beyond our grasp. What we know or may in the future know may be trifling compared with the unknowable unknowns. “As to myself,” remarked Isaac Newton in his old age, “I seem to have been only like a boy playing on the sea-shore, and diverting myself in now and then finding a smoother pebble or a prettier shell than ordinary, whilst the great ocean of truth lay all undiscovered before me.” It may be that we are all like that child on the strand, playing with the odd pebble or shell — and fated to remain so.
Mysterianism teaches us humility. Through science, we have come to understand much about nature, but much more may remain outside the scope of our perception and comprehension. If the Mysterians are right, science’s ultimate achievement may be to reveal to us its own limits…
On unknowable unknowns: Question Marks of the Mysterians, from @roughtype in his terrific newsletter, New Cartographies.
Pair with Flatland (here and here) and Godel’s second incompleteness theorem.
* Socrates (per Plato in Apology 22d)
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As we wonder, we might recall that it was on this date (tough different sources offer different November dates) in 1966 that 96 Tears, the debut studio album by the American garage rock band ? and the Mysterians was released. The title single, which had been released some months earlier was at #1 on the Billboard Hot 100; the album joined the single on the charts for fifteen weeks; the follow-up single “I Need Somebody” charted for ten weeks.
“We ceased to be the lunatic fringe. We’re now the lunatic core.”*…
Further, in a fashion, to yesterday’s post on analog computing, an essay from Benjamin Labatut (the author of two remarkable works of “scientific-historical fiction,” When We Cease to Understand the World and The MANIAC, continuing the animating theme of those books…
We will never know how many died during the Butlerian Jihad. Was it millions? Billions? Trillions, perhaps? It was a fantastic rage, a great revolt that spread like wildfire, consuming everything in its path, a chaos that engulfed generations in an orgy of destruction lasting almost a hundred years. A war with a death toll so high that it left a permanent scar on humanity’s soul. But we will never know the names of those who fought and died in it, or the immense suffering and destruction it caused, because the Butlerian Jihad, abominable and devastating as it was, never happened.
The Jihad was an imagined event, conjured up by Frank Herbert as part of the lore that animates his science-fiction saga Dune. It was humanity’s last stand against sentient technology, a crusade to overthrow the god of machine-logic and eradicate the conscious computers and robots that in the future had almost entirely enslaved us. Herbert described it as “a thalamic pause for all humankind,” an era of such violence run amok that it completely transformed the way society developed from then onward. But we know very little of what actually happened during the struggle itself, because in the original Dune series, Herbert gives us only the faintest outlines—hints, murmurs, and whispers, which carry the ghostly weight of prophecy. The Jihad reshaped civilization by outlawing artificial intelligence or any machine that simulated our minds, placing a damper on the worst excesses of technology. However, it was fought so many eons before the events portrayed in the novels that by the time they occur it has faded into legend and crystallized in apocrypha. The hard-won lessons of the catastrophe are preserved in popular wisdom and sayings: “Man may not be replaced.” “Once men turned their thinking over to machines in the hope that this would set them free. But that only permitted other men with machines to enslave them.” “We do not trust the unknown which can arise from imaginative technology.” “We must negate the machines-that-think.” The most enduring legacy of the Jihad was a profound change in humankind’s relationship to technology. Because the target of that great hunt, where we stalked and preyed upon the very artifacts we had created to lift ourselves above the seat that nature had intended for us, was not just mechanical intelligence but the machinelike attitude that had taken hold of our species: “Humans had set those machines to usurp our sense of beauty, our necessary selfdom out of which we make living judgments,” Herbert wrote.
Humans must set their own guidelines. This is not something machines can do. Reasoning depends upon programming, not on hardware, and we are the ultimate program!
The Butlerian Jihad removed a crutch—the part of ourselves that we had given over to technology—and forced human minds to develop above and beyond the limits of mechanistic reasoning, so that we would no longer depend on computers to do our thinking for us.
Herbert’s fantasy, his far-flung vision of a devastating war between humanity and the god of machine-logic, seemed quaint when he began writing it in the Sixties. Back then, computers were primitive by modern standards, massive mainframe contraptions that could process only hundreds of thousands of cycles per second (instead of billions, like today), had very little memory, operated via punch cards, and were not connected to one another. And we have easily ignored Herbert’s warnings ever since, but now the Butlerian Jihad has suddenly returned to plague us. The artificial-intelligence apocalypse is a new fear that keeps many up at night, a terror born of great advances that seem to suggest that, if we are not very careful, we may—with our own hands—bring forth a future where humanity has no place. This strange nightmare is a credible danger only because so many of our dreams are threatening to come true. It is the culmination of a long process that hearkens back to the origins of civilization itself, to the time when the world was filled with magic and dread, and the only way to guarantee our survival was to call down the power of the gods.
Apotheosis has always haunted the soul of humankind. Since ancient times we have suffered the longing to become gods and exceed the limits nature has placed on us. To achieve this, we built altars and performed rituals to ask for wisdom, blessings, and the means to reach beyond our capabilities. While we tend to believe that it is only now, in the modern world, that power and knowledge carry great risks, primitive knowledge was also dangerous, because in antiquity a part of our understanding of the world and ourselves did not come from us, but from the Other. From the gods, from spirits, from raging voices that spoke in silence.
[Labatut invokes the mysteries of the Vedas and their Altar of Fire, which was meant to develop “a mind, (that) when properly developed, could fly like a bird with outstretched wings and conquer the skies.”…]
Seen from afar by people who were not aware of what was being made, these men and women must surely have looked like bricklayers gone mad. And that same frantic folly seems to possess those who, in recent decades, have dedicated their hearts and minds to the building of a new mathematical construct, a soulless copy of certain aspects of our thinking that we have chosen to name “artificial intelligence,” a tool so formidable that, if we are to believe the most zealous among its devotees, will help us reach the heavens and become immortal…
[Labatut recounts the stories– and works– of some of the creators of AI’s DNA: George Boole (and his logic), Claude Shannon (who put that logic to work), and Geoffrey Hinton (Boole’s great-great-grandson, and “the Godfather of AI,” who created of the first neural networks, but has more recently undergone a change of opinion)…]
… Hinton has been transformed. He has mutated from an evangelist of a new form of reason into a prophet of doom. He says that what changed his mind was the realization that we had, in fact, not replicated our intelligence, but created a superior one.
Or was it something else, perhaps? Did some unconscious part of him whisper that it was he, rather than his great-great-grandfather, who was intended by God to find the mechanisms of thought? Hinton does not believe in God, and he would surely deny his ancestor’s claim that pain is an instrument of the Lord’s will, since he was forced to have every one of his meals on his knees, resting on a pillow like a monk praying at the altar, because of a back injury that caused him excruciating pain. For more than seventeen years, he could not sit down, and only since 2022 has he managed to do so long enough to eat.
Hinton is adamant that the dangers of thinking machines are real. And not just short-term effects like job replacement, disinformation, or autonomous lethal weapons, but an existential risk that some discount as fantasy: that our place in the world might be supplanted by AI. Part of his fear is that he believes AI could actually achieve a sort of immortality, as the Vedic gods did. “The good news,” he has said, “is we figured out how to build things that are immortal. When a piece of hardware dies, they don’t die. If you’ve got the weights stored in some medium and you can find another piece of hardware that can run the same instructions, then you can bring it to life again. So, we’ve got immortality. But it’s not for us.”
Hinton seems to be afraid of what we might see when the embers of the Altar of Fire die down at the end of the sacrifice and the sharp coldness of the beings we have conjured up starts to seep into our bones. Are we really headed for obsolescence? Will humanity perish, not because of the way we treat all that surrounds us, nor due to some massive unthinking rock hurled at us by gravity, but as a consequence of our own irrational need to know all that can be known? The supposed AI apocalypse is different from the mushroom-cloud horror of nuclear war, and unlike the ravages of the wildfires, droughts, and inundations that are becoming commonplace, because it arises from things that we have, since the beginning of civilization, always considered positive and central to what makes us human: reason, intelligence, logic, and the capacity to solve the problems, puzzles, and evils that taint even the most fortunate person’s existence with everyday suffering. But in clawing our way to apotheosis, in daring to follow the footsteps of the Vedic gods who managed to escape from Death, we may shine a light on things that should remain in darkness. Because even if artificial intelligence never lives up to the grand and terrifying nightmare visions that presage a nonhuman world where algorithms hum along without us, we will still have to contend with the myriad effects this technology will have on human society, culture, and economics.
In the meantime, the larger specter of superintelligent AI looms over us. And while it is less likely and perhaps even impossible (nothing but a fairy tale, some say, a horror story intended to attract more money and investment by presenting a series of powerful systems not as the next step in our technological development but as a death-god that ends the world), it cannot be easily dispelled, for it reaches down and touches the fibers of our mythmaking apparatus, that part of our being that is atavistic and fearful, because it reminds us of a time when we shivered in caves and huddled together, while outside in the dark, with eyes that could see in the night, the many savage beasts and monsters of the past sniffed around for traces of our scent.
As every new AI model becomes stronger, as the voices of warning form a chorus, and even the most optimistic among us begin to fear this new technology, it is harder and harder to think without panic or to reason with logic. Thankfully, we have many other talents that don’t answer to reason. And we can always rise and take a step back from the void toward which we have so hurriedly thrown ourselves, by lending an ear to the strange voices that arise from our imagination, that feral territory that will always remain a necessary refuge and counterpoint to rationality.
Faced, as we are, with wild speculation, confronted with dangers that no one, however smart or well informed, is truly capable of managing or understanding, and taunted by the promises of unlimited potential, we may have to sound out the future not merely with science, politics, and reason, but with that devil-eye we use to see in the dark: fiction. Because we can find keys to doors we have yet to encounter in the worlds that authors have imagined in the past. As we grope forward in a daze, battered and bewildered by the capabilities of AI, we could do worse than to think about the desert planet where the protagonists of Herbert’s Dune novels sought to peer into the streaming sands of future time, under the heady spell of a drug called spice, to find the Golden Path, a way for human beings to break from tyranny and avoid extinction or stagnation by being more diverse, resilient, and free, evolving past purely logical reasoning and developing our minds and faculties to the point where our thoughts and actions are unpredictable and not bound by statistics. Herbert’s books, with their strange mixture of past and present, remind us that there are many ways in which we can continue forward while preserving our humanity. AI is here already, but what we choose to do with it and what limits we agree to place on its development remain decisions to be made. No matter how many billions of dollars are invested in the AI companies that promise to eliminate work, solve climate change, cure cancer, and rain down miracles unlike anything we have seen before, we can never fully give ourselves over to these mathematical creatures, these beings with no soul or sympathy, because they are neither alive nor conscious—at least not yet, and certainly not like us—so they do not share the contradictory nature of our minds.
In the coming years, as people armed with AI continue making the world faster, stranger, and more chaotic, we should do all we can to prevent these systems from giving more and more power to the few who can build them. But we should also consider a warning from Herbert, the central commandment he chose to enshrine at the heart of future humanity’s key religious text, a rule meant to keep us from becoming subservient to the products of our reason, and from bowing down before the God of Logic and his many fearsome offspring:
Thou shalt not make a machine in the likeness of a human mind…
Before and after artificial intelligence: “The Gods of Logic” in @Harpers. Eminently worth reading in full.
For a less pessimistic view, see: “A Journey Through the Uncanny Valley: Our Relational Futures with AI,” from @dylanhendricks at @iftf.
* Geoffrey Hinton
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As we deliberate on Daedalus’ caution, we might we might send fantastically far-sighted birthday greetings to a tecno-optimist who might likely have brushed aside Labatut’s concerns: Hugo Gernsback, a Luxemborgian-American inventor, broadcast pioneer, writer, and publisher; he was born on this date in 1884.
Gernsback held 80 patents at the time of his death; he founded radio station WRNY, was involved in the first television broadcasts, and is considered a pioneer in amateur radio. But it was as a writer and publisher that he probably left his most lasting mark: In 1926, as owner/publisher of the magazine Modern Electrics, he filled a blank spot in his publication by dashing off the first chapter of a series called “Ralph 124C 41+.” The twelve installments of “Ralph” were filled with inventions unknown in 1926, including “television” (Gernsback is credited with introducing the word), fluorescent lighting, juke boxes, solar energy, television, microfilm, vending machines, and the device we now call radar.
The “Ralph” series was an astounding success with readers; and later that year Gernsback founded the first magazine devoted to science fiction, Amazing Stories. Believing that the perfect sci-fi story is “75 percent literature interwoven with 25 percent science,” he coined the term “science fiction.”
Gernsback was a “careful” businessman, who was tight with the fees that he paid his writers– so tight that H. P. Lovecraft and Clark Ashton Smith referred to him as “Hugo the Rat.”
Still, his contributions to the genre as publisher were so significant that, along with H.G. Wells and Jules Verne, he is sometimes called “The Father of Science Fiction”; in his honor, the annual Science Fiction Achievement awards are called the “Hugos.”
(Coincidentally, today is also the birthday– in 1906– of Philo T. Farnsworth, the man who actually did invent television.)
“We shape our tools and thereafter our tools shape us”*…
AI is on the march, with implications, TBD, for… well, for everything. Nayef Al-Rodhan ponders its potential impact on philosophy…
Around the world, Artificial Intelligence (AI) is seeping into every aspect of our daily life, transforming our computational power, and with it the manufacturing speed, military capabilities, and the fabric of our societies. Generative AI applications such as OpenAI’s ChatGPT, the fastest growing consumer application in history, have created both positive anticipation and alarm about the future potential of AI technology. Predictions range from doomsday scenarios describing the extinction of the human species to optimistic takes on how it could revolutionise the way we work, live and communicate. If used correctly, AI could catapult scientific, economic and technological advances into a new phase in human history. In doing so it has the potential to solve some of humanity’s biggest problems by preventing serious food and water scarcity, mitigating inequality and poverty, diagnosing life-threatening diseases, tackling climate change, preventing pandemics, designing new game-changing proteins, and much more.
AI technology is rapidly moving in the direction of Artificial General Intelligence (AGI), the ability to achieve human-level machine intelligence, with Google’s AI Chief recently predicting that there is a 50% chance that we’ll reach AGI within five years. This raises important questions about our human nature, our sentience, and our dignity needs. Can AI ever become truly sentient? If so, how will we know if that happens? Should sentient machines share similar rights and responsibilities as humans? The boardroom drama at OpenAI in late November 2023 also deepened the debate about the dangers of techno-capitalism: is it possible for corporate giants in the AI space to balance safety with the pursuit of revenues and profit?
As AI advances at a breakneck speed, ethical considerations are becoming increasingly critical. Sentient AI implies that the technology has the capacity to evolve and be self-aware, in doing so feeling and experiencing the world just like a human would. According to the British mathematician Alan Turing, if the human cannot distinguish between whether it is conversing with an AI or another human, then the AI in question has passed the test. However, given AI’s sophisticated conversational skills and ability to give the impression of consciousness, the Turing Test is becoming too narrow and does not grasp all the nuances of what makes us sentient and, more broadly, human. To stay on the front foot of technological progress, we need to supplement the Turing Test with transdisciplinary frameworks for evaluating increasingly human-like AI. These frameworks should be based on approaches rooted in psychology, neuroscience, philosophy, the social sciences, political science and other relevant disciplines.
We do not yet have a full understanding of what makes a thing sentient but transdisciplinary efforts by neuroscientists, computer scientists and philosophers are helping develop a deeper understanding of consciousness and sentience. So far, we have found that emotions are one of the important characteristics needed for sentience, as is agency or intrinsic motivation. A sentient AI would need to have the ability to create autonomous goals and an ability to pursue these goals. In human beings, this quality has evolved from our intrinsic survival instinct, while in AI it is still, for now, lacking. According to recent studies, a sense of time, narrative, and memory is also critical for determining sentience. A level of sentence comparable to humans would require autobiographical memory and a concept of the linear progression of time. In current AI systems, these capabilities are limited – but recent developments raise uncomfortable philosophical questions about whether sentient AI should share similar rights and responsibilities in the event that it becomes a reality. And if so, how does one hold the technology accountable for their actions? And how will we define – legally and ethically – sentient AI’s role in society? We currently treat AI technology and machines as property, so how will this change if they are granted their own rights? There is no clear-cut answer, but as I argued in ‘Transdisciplinarity, neuro-techno-philosophy, and the future of philosophy’, we should attribute agency to machines whenever they appear to possess the same qualities that characterise humans. I also believe that machines ought to be treated as agents if they prove themselves to be emotional, amoral, and egoist.
These debates, however they unfold, will clearly have deep implications on the future of philosophy itself. In ‘Transdisciplinarity, neuro-techno-philosophy, and the future of philosophy’ I make the case that it is a short step from AI’s present capabilities to its potential future use developing novel philosophical hypotheses and thought experiments. It is therefore not unthinkable that future AI systems could break new ground in the field of normative ethics, helping pinpoint moral principles that human philosophers have failed to grasp. However, we should be mindful that their conception of morality or beauty, for example, may have nothing in common with ours, or it may supersede our own capacities and reflections. This could limit the ability of sophisticated artificial agents to answer long-standing philosophical questions, however superior they may be to the most advanced human intellectual output. We should consider how these developments are likely to impact how we understand the world around us, both in terms of the subject matter and of the theorising entity involved. Artificial agents will no doubt be put under the microscope and will be studied alongside the human mind and human nature: not just to compare and contrast, but also to understand how these artificial entities relate to – and treat – one another, and humanity itself. There is also the question of how human philosophers will react if and when AI-steered machines become superior philosophical theorisers. Will flesh and blood philosophers be forced to compete cognitively with entities whose intellectual abilities vastly supersede our own? Will AI systems overtake our limited human reasoning and reflective capacities? If this happens, what does this mean for our own human agency, the control we have over our lives and the future of our societies?…
… Powerful AI technologies will progressively increase our capabilities, for good or ill. We therefore need to be clear-sighted about the AI governance frameworks urgently needed to futureproof the safe use of AI. The recent high drama at OpenAI, whose founding mission is “to ensure that artificial general intelligence benefits all of humanity”, gave us a glimpse of the main rift in the AI industry, pitting those focused on commercial growth against those uneasy with the potential ramifications of the unbridled development of AI. However well-motivated AI governance schemes might be, they are less robust than one would hope. At the same time, self-regulation by global tech companies is becoming increasingly difficult given the large sums at stake and the economic and political influence of these companies.
With this in mind, we must keep an open mind not just about the immediate man-made dangers of AI technologies but also their potential to redefine what it means to be human. They will shape how we understand and engage with the world, in doing so making us reevaluate our place in it. Our chances of survival as a species and the likelihood of our existence in a free, independent, peaceful, prosperous, creative and dignified world will depend on the future trajectory of AI. Our historical yearning for longing and belonging hangs in the balance. To protect citizens from potential harm and limit the risks, AI should be regulated just like any other technology. We must also apply transdisciplinary approaches to make sure that the use and governance of AI is always steered by human dignity needs for all, at all times and under all circumstances. AI’s trajectory is not predetermined, but the clock is ticking and humanity may have less time than it thinks to control its collective destiny…
Eminently worth reading in full. Whether or not one agrees with the author’s specific conclusions, his larger point– that we need to be mindful and purposive about the deployment of AI is surely well-taken: “Sentience, Safe AI and The Future of Philosophy: A Transdisciplinary Analysis,” from @SustainHistory in @oxpubphil.
See also: “Thinking About AI, Before AI Disappears” from Quentin Hardy‘s new newsletter, Technohumanism. (source of image above).
* Father John Culkin, SJ, a Professor of Communication at Fordham University (and friend of Marshall McLuhan, to whom the quote is often incorrectly attributed)
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As we think about thinking, we might recall that it was on this date in 1979 that Apple began work on the Lisa, which would become the world’s first commercial computer with a graphical user interface.
Originally intended to sell for $2,000 and ship in 1981, the Lisa was delayed until 1983 and sold for $10,000. Utilizing technology ahead of its time, its high cost, relative lack of software, and some hardware reliability issues ultimately sank the success of the Lisa. Still, much of the technology introduced by the Lisa (itself rooted in the earlier work of Doug Engelbart [and here] and Xerox PARC) influenced the development of the Macintosh as well as other future computer and operating system designs: e.g., a bitmapped display, a window-based graphical user interface, icons, folders, mouse (two-button), (Ethernet) networking, file servers, print servers, and email.
“I regard consciousness as fundamental. I regard matter as derivative from consciousness. We cannot get behind consciousness. Everything that we talk about, everything that we regard as existing, postulates consciousness.”*…
The image above is from an engaging essay on “Why we need to figure out a theory of consciousness.” But, as Robert Lawrence Kuhn argues, in practice the issue with “the Hard Problem” might better be understood as the need to choose among, then build upon (one or a few of) the myriad theories that we have. Helpfully, Kuhn has surveyed and mapped that theoretical landscape…
Explanations of consciousness abound and the radical diversity of theories is telling. Explanations, or theories, are said to work at astonishingly divergent orders of magnitude and putative realms of reality. My purpose here must be humble: collect and categorize, not assess and adjudicate. Seek insights, not answers.
Unrealistically, I’d like to get them all, at least all contemporary theories that are sufficiently distinct with explanations that can surmount an arbitrary hurdle of rationality or conceivability. Falsification or verification is not on the agenda. I’m less concerned about the ontological truth of explanations/theories than in identifying them and then locating them on a “Landscape” to enable categorization and assess relationships. Next, I assess implications of categories for “big questions.” Thus, this Landscape is not about how consciousness is measured or evolved or even works, but about what consciousness is and what difference it makes.
It’s the classic “mind-body problem:” How do the felt experiences in our minds relate to the neural processes in our brains? How do mental states, whether sensory, cognitive, emotional, or even noumenal (selfless) awareness, correlate with brain states? The Landscape of Consciousness explanations or theories I want to draw is as broad as possible, including those that cannot be subsumed by, and possibly not even accessed by, the scientific method. This freedom from constraint, as it were, is no excuse for wooly thinking. Standards of rationality and clarity of argument must be maintained even more tenaciously, and bases of beliefs must be specified even more clearly.
I have two main aims: (i) gather and describe the various theories and array them in some kind of meaningful structure of high-level or first-order categories (and under Materialism, subcategories); and (ii) assess their implications, with respect to four big questions: meaning/purpose/value (if any); artificial intelligence (AI) consciousness; virtual immortality; and survival beyond death.
Theories overlap; some work together. Moreover, while a real-world landscape of consciousness, even simplified, would be drawn with three dimensions (at least), with multiple kinds and levels of nestings—a combinatorial explosion (and likely no closer to truth)—I satisfice with a one-dimensional toy-model. I array all the theories on a linear spectrum, simplistically and roughly, from the “most physical” on the left (at the beginning) to the “least physical” on the right (near the end). (I have two final categories after this spectrum.) The physicalism assumed in Materialism Theories of consciousness is characterized by naturalistic, science-based perspectives, while non-materialism theories have various degrees of nonphysicalist perspectives outside the ambit of current science and in some cases not subject to the scientific method of experimentation and replicability.
Please do not ascribe the relative importance of a theory to the relative size of its description. The shortest can be the strongest. It sometimes takes more words to describe lesser-known theories. For each description I feel the tension between conciseness and completeness. Moreover, several are not complete theories in themselves but ways to think about consciousness that strike me as original and perhaps insightful…
There follows are survey of the strands of thought/theory depicted here:
Absolutely fascinating: “A landscape of consciousness: Toward a taxonomy of explanations and implications,” from @RobertLawrKuhn via @RogersBacon1…
… Who also published this apposite article: “A Paradigm for AI Consciousness.”
* Max Planck
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As we examine explanations, we might send communicative birthday greetings to Camillo Golgi; he was born on this date in 1843. A biologist and pathologist, he discovered a staining technique called black reaction (sometimes called Golgi’s method or Golgi’s staining in his honor) in 1873, a major breakthrough in neuroscience. He was the first to identify axons and dendrites and their functions. He also identified the sense receptors of muscular sensations. Several structures and phenomena in anatomy and physiology are named for him, including the Golgi apparatus, the Golgi tendon organ and the Golgi tendon reflex.
Golgi’s investigations into the fine structure of the nervous system earned him (with the Spanish histologist Santiago Ramón y Cajal) the 1906 Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine.
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