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Can machines be conscious?
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Essay of 3 pages for the course Natural Sciences at UCL (good)
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Can machines be conscious?- De ne what we class as a machine- if we say ‘biological machine’ then humans are this and do have
consciousness therefore we require an alterna ve de ni on. De ne machine, a system must ful l both a
func on, and be directed towards an end goal ("telos"). Machines are directed by the humans opera ng
them towards a goal.
- Develop a theory of what it means to be conscious
- Issue of AI is becoming more and more controversial as a result of its increased integra on into our lives,
and the consciousness that machines may supposedly possess threatens to throw the status of being a
person into further controversy
- S mulus descrip on
- Is there a fundamental di erence between the nature of a person and a robot?
- Debate of machine consciousness has been around for a long me, with proponents of strong AI vs weak
AI having exchanged philosophical arguments for a long me
- Consciousness - puts ques ons on our reality and the way we perceive things in our daily lives
- Will use Turing Test, de ni on of consciousness and Searle’s Chinese Room
Problem of Cartesian dualism
- Assume Cartesian dualism then machines cannot be conscious
- For Descartes posited the existence of two substances, the physical and the mental.
- In ‘The Medita ons’, Descartes asserts that mind and body are fundamentally separate and can exist
independently. One of his arguments for this was that you can doubt your body, but not your mind, so
they are di erent. This suggests an immaterial factor to consciousness, such as a soul, which a machine
could never possess.
- There are dins c substances and since machines are manufactured by humans they are comprised only
of physical en es and we are unable to create mental en es from physical ones.
- Ryle aimed to refute Descartes’ model of body and mind. In his ‘A Concept of Mind’ (1945), he calls
Descartes’ model a ‘category mistake’ and the ‘doctrine of the ghost in the machine’
- My own example of a category mistake is, if one person asked another to show them an ou it. The
second person duly shows every item of dress in the ou it, one by one. The rst person says; “They were
all nice, but where is the ou it?”. He concludes that since he has never seen the ou it, but people talk
about it as if it exists, that it must be ghostly or unseeable. In this example, the individual made a
category mistake. A category mistake is de ned as a conceptual error, the false assump on that a generic
term refers to an addi onal en ty, over and above its cons tuents. In response to Descartes, Ryle argues,
by analogy, that belief in a substan ve immaterial mind, apart from the body, is as unjus ed as the
belief that there is a ghost opera ng machines.
Func onalism as an alterna ve to de ne consciousness
- Cartesian dualism itself is in itself a weak theory and problema c as seen through the interac on
problem- hat interac on between mental and physical substances would involve a causal impossibility
- Rather than de ning consciousness by making substance claims it is reasonable to de ne consciousness
as a func on.
- Func onalism is the view that any par cular thing is de ned purely in terms of its func on, irrespec ve
of the material it is composed of. This means that the mental states are properly understood as
func onal states.
- Func onalism adapted from hard behaviourism as it learn from the failure that mental states are holis c
and from this they concluded that they must be understood func onally in terms of how they interact
with one another. There is no intrinsic fact about the brain or the human mind that de nes what it
means to be conscious, but a func onalist would accept that any machine that func ons like it is so
conscious is in fact conscious. Thus, if a machine can func on like a mind then it is conscious
- Func onalists agree with Ryle, sta ng that the mind is more properly understood in terms of func ons,
as de ned by their interac ons with one another, their role in producing behaviour, and their role in
rela on to various inputs, and it is a category mistake to confuse func ons with things. As machines also
have func onal states, if these appear iden cal to ours, then they must be similarly conscious. Hence
func onalism is compa ble with the idea of machine consciousness.
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