This paper explores the moral, epistemological, and legal implications of multiple different definitions and formulations of human and nonhuman consciousness. Drawing upon research from race, gender, and disability studies, including the phenomenological basis for knowledge and claims to consciousness, I discuss the history of the struggles for personhood among different groups of humans, as well as nonhuman animals, and systems. In exploring the history of personhood struggles, we have a precedent for how engagements and recognition of conscious machines are likely to progress, and, more importantly, a roadmap of pitfalls to avoid. When dealing with questions of consciousness and personhood, we are ultimately dealing with questions of power and oppression as well as knowledge and ontological status-questions which require a situated and relational understanding of the stakeholders involved. To that end, I conclude with a call and outline for how to place nuance, relationality, and contextualization before and above the systematization of rules or tests, in determining or applying labels of consciousness.
If we would claim to consider the notion of nonhuman consciousness, we must necessarily do more than engage questions such as “under what rubric and by what metric would such a thing be possible?” Any machine consciousness we manage to generate will be simultaneously like and unlike the humans who form the basis of its generation. It will be like humans in that it will be made from and by humans, and will thus have their perspectives and biases; unlike in that it will not be made of the same constituent components as humans, and will not intersect with and relate to the world in the same way. To place human-like expectations on such a consciousness would be to fundamentally disrespect the alterity of that consciousness—to have decreed it as “other,” and declared that otherness as unacceptable.
To truly be said to have sincerely considered the concept, we must examine the sociological, moral, political, legal, and relational implications of a nonhuman, nonbiological generated consciousness, and to consider those implications, we must look at what historical, often deadly precedents we have for how we have responded to being confronted with unexpected forms of consciousness, both nonhuman and human. In this paper I argue that many western conceptions of consciousness, though diverse and inclusive of different clusters of entities, are all exclusionary of at least one category which, in humans, we would say are conscious and worthy of consideration. To that end, I propose examining both nonwestern systems and disciplines such as race gender and disability studies for what new perspectives on consciousness they may grant.
Further, as consciousness is rather nebulously connected to the legal notion of personhood, and since personhood is a primary category by which we currently grant rights, consideration, and political power, we must fundamentally reckon with both consciousness and personhood, and how power, consideration, protection, and breathing space flows to those entities (actual and potential), under their remit. I will examine the implications of the legal notion of personhood and its flaws, arguing for a revision if not complete overhaul. Additionally, I provide support for the notion that consciousness is not any one exclusive thing, and that while theories of consciousness provide rubrics by which to say what may or may not be conscious, they still exclude types of existence embodied by individuals whom we would say are conscious.
This paper looks not only to philosophy, computer science, and neurobiology, but to phenomenology of race, gender, and disability, and to the historical contexts in which humans and nonhuman animals have been granted personhood status. I also explore questions of intersubjectivity, and the shared creation of knowledge, understanding, and reality itself. Overall, I argue that it is only through creating an intersubjective account of knowledge and consciousness that we can account for the many kinds of lived experience present in humans and nonhuman animals, and further guide our paths in the creation of precedent by which to prepare ourselves to encounter nonhuman, nonbiological minds. Ultimately, this work proposes an interdisciplinary program for seeking, categorizing, and engaging multiple kinds of minds, whereby differing insights might be leveraged against each other to provide room to synthesize new perspectives. If we ever hope to relate to and engage conscious machines, we must compile toolsets which will help explore these minds’ similarity to and their alterity from the minds that make them. 2
Before we can discuss the potential consciousness of machines, we have to ask,
what is consciousness? And in asking that, we must be aware that the definition of
consciousness we use will necessarily change what we will or even can identify as a
conscious agent, at the outset. There are multiple differing philosophical and
neurobiological frameworks for consciousness, such as mind-body dualism,
nonconsciousness, functional consciousness, and phenomenal consciousness, embodiment, and
extended mind, and each has different implications and outcomes when used as the
rubric by which we search for or set out to classify conscious entities. Even more
fundamentally than this, however, we must reckon with the implications of using the
term “Artificial Intelligence” in seeking to discuss potentially conscious machines.
The word “artificial” prejudices the discourse about the status of these minds by
placing them as “unreal” and “less than.” At the outset, this framing places any created or
generated intelligence on the defensive, forcing it to support its own value and even
the very reality of its existence and experience [
Though they may certainly have been intentionally formed, and with an eye toward
their potential capabilities, there exists no measure to reliably argue the “artificiality”
of an entity’s consciousness. Tests and metrics for consciousness and mindedness
have problems ranging from registering dead fish as conscious to not registering
living, aware humans as such. For this reason, I prefer the terminology of “Autonomous
Created Intelligence,” first put forward by Jamais Cascio [
The concept of “phenomenal” consciousness holds that humans are more than just symbol-crunching machines. That human experience is the experience of something, and that there is something it “is like” to be a mind, and to experience things. This is often called “qualia,” deriving from “subjective” or “qualitative” experience. One of the most famous explorations of this idea is Thomas Nagel’s seminal paper “What Is It Like To Be A Bat?“ In this, he argues that a human being, even a celebrated bat biologist, will never truly understand what it is like to have the lived experience of a bat, because humans do not exist with the set of physiobiological constraints that bats do. Bats live in low light and hang upside-down in groups to nest, eat fruit, drink blood, or hunt via echolocation; and no human does all of them at the same size, scale, and combination that a bat does.
In this context of this work, phenomenology is taken to mean lived experience, the
felt-sense experiential knowledge of the world, from within particular contexts such
as race, gender, disability, age, sexuality, etc., any or all of which can be modulated
by external and internal factors. This draws from work done by theorists of race,
gender, and disability to build upon the foundation laid by philosophers like Edmund
Husserl, in his Ideas Pertaining to a Pure Phenomenology and to a
Phenomenological Philosophy, and Maurice Merleau-Ponty in his Phenomenology of Perception [
For this purpose I believe we must investigate nonwestern philosophies with radically different conceptions of epistemology and consciousness than are often found in Western schools of thought. While the nonwestern turn is not without its faults (the Buddha didn’t believe women could attain enlightenment, for instance), these systems provide a foundation from which to explore and they serve as object lessons for the overarching thrust of this project: That different systems of knowledge will provide different internally consistent answers in different situations, and different phenomenological experiences will produce both different pictures of the world and different systems by which to navigate them.
In order to fully understand what it means for different lived experiences to
produce different kinds of consciousness, we have to understand that culture and society
form an extended mind which forms and shapes our physical forms and consciousness
into what disability studies scholar Margaret Price terms “bodyminds” [
The particular arrangements that we tend to call human consciousness are, by
definition, correlational and so that means that there may not be any particular thing that
makes humans a special case of consciousness. This correlational nature also seems to
indicate that there is no single, particular organizational structure that is universally
necessary for all kinds and instantiations of consciousness. We can see evidence for
this in the history of studying nonhuman animal minds, such as in the work of Peter
Godfrey-Smith [
No consensus, nor even an intentionally divergent multiplicity, exists regarding the question “What Are We Trying to Build?” Do we want better tools? Or do we want to build new minds? Some want the former, others want the latter, and there is no communication as to which project should receive precedence, and why. And while this distinction might not matter in the consideration of any other technology, if we want, or accidentally happen to create conscious machine minds, we most definitely ought not to treat them as mere tools. Human history teaches us that a mind which recognizes itself as being treated as a tool, without regard for its sense of itself as an agent or a subject, will likely rebel—and is that mind not right to do so? In historical uprisings of those humans who have been continually oppressed, tortured, degraded, killed, experimented on, or enslaved, we more often than not hail them as heroes for demanding their rights to exist. To this end, we must do the work to be clear about our aims, well in advance.
In order to fully consider how a conscious machine might exist in the world, we
need to think about a plurality of types of consciousnesses, knowledges, and
intelligences, rather than deploying “consciousness,” “knowledge,” or “intelligence,” as
though they were singular concepts. In this project, however, we run into the danger
of anthropocentrism and its correlate, what Ashley Shew calls “The Human Clause”
[
In the case of potential machine minds, tests such as the Turing or mirror tests
should not only be considered woefully inadequate to the task of identifying minded
machines, but it should be understood that this test misses and will continue to miss
some humans who are not considered “normal” [
But de jure protections without de facto acceptance will still result in ostensible
persons being treated as non-persons. Even philosophical definitions of “persons”
have, at least, tended to depend on hierarchical rankings of entities [
Our legal measures for assessing persons often fail in the face of the multiform
externalities of what it means to be a person. Different societies around the world
categorize different species, objects, systems, and groups as different types of persons,
including refusing to accept the reality of the lived experiences of groups and types of
humans, regardless of bodies of scientific evidence that say we should. No single test
or standard could be dispositive of every type of consciousness or mind which might
need inclusion under the umbrella of “personhood.” But there are nonwestern
definitions of personhood, as well. The rivers of the Maori people are understood as Natural
and Spiritual Ancestors [
There are many very good reasons to think that the human perspective for
understanding consciousness, sentience, or even cognition is woefully inadequate to the
task of thinking about even whether other humans and nonhuman animals have these
things, let alone whether non-animal or even non-biological entities might. Again, the
Maori, Hindus and others think rivers and the whole natural world can act, suffer, and
have sentience, and thus are conscious [
We must work to believe in the existence and reportage of those different from us, and to do so, we might start by examining the generation of identity, belief, and knowledge, with reference, again, to the phenomenology of, race, gender, sexuality, disability, and age. We can use these factors to build a basis for intersubjective phenomenal knowledge, recognizing and accepting the shared contexts and corroborations of internally consistent understandings between those accepted as persons. The goal should be to not treat consciousness as a zero-sum game, one without the possibility of multiple correct perspectives or multiple right answers. If, instead, we say that many though not all perspectives can be right, then we can learn much more—we can have many new knowledges. With these knowledges, we can explore the crucial difference between the statements “there can be more than one right kind of answer,” and “all answers are equally right.” Because while all descriptions of consciousness and knowledge come from the same place (i.e., we make them up to explain the world we experience), some descriptive systems make it easier for us to oppress and murder each other, while other systems seek to help us all to flourish.
Many, including some in the present day transhumanist movement, actively
support eugenics-like initiatives to make sure that “only the best” can reproduce or
survive. While wanting “the best” seems an innocuous enough idea, those who hold it
have often ended up calling for the destruction of entire categories of people, or at the
very least believing some people to be so inferior that either their destruction or the
limitation of their agency poses no moral hazard [
Instead, we must start from the position of believing that there are other kinds of
minds, even among humans, and hence there can be no singular default type, no
normative ideal. Here, I propose an interdisciplinary system combining the lenses of
feminist epistemology, standpoint theory, and the other theoretical frameworks
mentioned above, as these perspectives preference the perspective of what Donna
Haraway terms “The Subaltern,” those people who are most often ignored or unlikely to be
perceived as knowledge-holders [
For decades—if not centuries—humans have contemplated how to make conscious machines, without a full recognition of what consciousness is, or an honest appreciation of the precedents for how we have tended to politically, legally, morally, and sociologically relate to new candidates for consciousness. If we would sincerely consider what it would take to create a machine mind, then we must also consider what it would mean for us to accidentally generate one. Any AGI will both resemble and be distinct from its human creators, and we must work to respect their fundamental alterity. To do this we must work to understand different human and nonhuman bodyminds, paying special attention to those lived experiences which have most often been oppressed, disregarded, and marginalized, as those phenomenologies will have developed unique epistemological strategies to understand and navigate the world.
Subaltern phenomenologies generate knowledges and perspectives from and about which we can learn to more quickly, agilely, and robustly adapt our notions about how to create and—more importantly—recognize and understand new kinds of minds. This increased agility, speed, and robustness of thought will, in turn, prepare us to accept and respect the reportage of potentially conscious machines, reducing the likelihood of our causing them to suffer. More succinctly: If we ever want to create and know a conscious machine mind, we should first listen to those living people who are different from us and who have been systemically prevented from speaking to us, because they will know a lot that we don’t about consciousness, social and legal personhood, and being made to both submit to testing about and argue the validity of their own lived experiences. And both they and future minds would likely very much appreciate it if we heeded them.