Consciousness Considered

Today, because I'm on leave, I'm back to my usual pot of Earl Grey routine here in my study, listening to Chopin and staring out into the green foliage outside my window and the dull grey skies in the distant, which seem to forebode rain and thunderstorms later. 

Maybe today we'll discuss a bit about consciousness. This is a favourite topic among philosophers and people with religious beliefs. There are a lot of terms related to consciousness, some used synonymically with it like 'mind', 'soul' and 'self'. Each of these terms gives a slightly different nuance to the meaning.

Actually what do we even mean by consciousness? American philosopher Thomas Nagel in his famous paper "What is it like to be a Bat", perhaps gave the simplest articulation of it by stating "an organism has conscious mental states if there's something that is like to be that organism--something it is like for the organism.".

We all know what it is like to be ourselves. It's the feeling you are conscious of right now while you are reading these words, comprehending, wondering, comparing, objecting or agreeing with what I'm saying. And we take it for granted that other people feel something like that too, when they are sane and awake. "The lights are on", as Sam Harris like to say.

This first-person 'feeling', do other organisms, say a bat with vastly a different neurophysiology, have it too? I know what it feels like to be me but what is it like if I were a bat?  We could argue that we need something complex like a brain to be conscious. Could consciousness be an 'emergent' property of complex systems, like an ant or termite colony which is capable of behaving 'intelligently' as a group?

As it is today, it is safe to say, no one knows. Consciousness is the ultimate mystery, partly because we are using consciousness to investigate consciousness. This is why philosopher David Chalmers calls it the "hard problem of consciousness" as opposed to the 'easier' problem of just investigating the physical brain and its processes which generate so-called consciousness. 

This is the age old mind-body problem--that eternal Cartesian division between the immaterial and the material properties of our existence. "I think therefore I am"--Descartes's famous dictum asserting that the only thing that we can be sure of is that we are thinking, therefore at least that is real. The rest is up for grabs. 

That resulted in all the different schools of thoughts we have today--dualists who think that mind and matter are two distinct substances or monists, which are either idealists who believe that the entire universe is a projection of consciousness or materialists who believe that matter is all there is. And there are those who try to marry the two like the panpsychists, who speculate that perhaps consciousness could be a fundamental ingredient of all matter. 

Religious and mystically-inclined people do not like the materialist view because it lacks that magical substance called 'soul' that defines who we are. Certainly we are not the same as stones and trees. We have a soul that lives on after the material body has disintegrated. But then, there are animists among many primitive tribes who believe that even stones and trees have immaterial spirits and are 'alive'.

Can AI be conscious, if not already? LLMs today already can converse like humans and would arguably pass any Turing test, if not now, in the near future. If they cannot be distinguished from humans, are they not at least the proverbial philosophical zombie who is capable of behaving exactly like any one of us? 

Philosophers use the philosophical zombie thought experiment to argue against the materialist view of consciousness.  There are others who think that consciousness is a false problem, similar to the definition of life. We used to believe in some kind of elan vital substance or 'life force' that differentiates between living and non-living beings. Now we can see many organisms like viruses that are hard to be lumped into either category. Why can't life or consciousness lie on a continuum? 

Could consciousness be a measurable quantity of complex systems? Scientists who believe that have come up with Integrated Information Theory or IIT which defines a mathematical quantity based on the amount of 'integrated information' in a system, measuring how 'conscious' a system is.

Personally, I am open to all ideas. I think there may not be an answer that satisfies us simply because we are computationally-bounded observers based on Stephen Wolfram's theory of a computational universe.  We only perceive things that matter to us and are limited in the way we comprehend the universe. 

I am happy simply typing these words, thinking, speculating and observing. In other words, just being me: Conscious.