=Paper=
{{Paper
|id=Vol-2287/paper5
|storemode=property
|title=Consciousness and Conscious Machines: What’s At Stake?
|pdfUrl=https://ceur-ws.org/Vol-2287/paper5.pdf
|volume=Vol-2287
|authors=Damien Patrick Williams
|dblpUrl=https://dblp.org/rec/conf/aaaiss/Williams19
}}
==Consciousness and Conscious Machines: What’s At Stake?==
https://ceur-ws.org/Vol-2287/paper5.pdf
Consciousness and Conscious Machines: What’s At
Stake?
Damien Patrick Williams [0000-0001-6652-2010]
Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University
Damienw7@vt.edu
Abstract. This paper explores the moral, epistemological, and legal implica-
tions 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 conscious-
ness, 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 important-
ly, a roadmap of pitfalls to avoid. When dealing with questions of conscious-
ness and personhood, we are ultimately dealing with questions of power and
oppression as well as knowledge and ontological status—questions which re-
quire a situated and relational understanding of the stakeholders involved. To
that end, I conclude with a call and outline for how to place nuance, relationali-
ty, and contextualization before and above the systematization of rules or tests,
in determining or applying labels of consciousness.
Keywords: Consciousness, Machine Consciousness, Philosophy of Mind, Phe-
nomenology, Bodyminds
1 Introduction
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 de-
creed it as “other,” and declared that otherness as unacceptable.
To truly be said to have sincerely considered the concept, we must examine the so-
ciological, moral, political, legal, and relational implications of a nonhuman, nonbio-
logical 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
2
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 cate-
gory 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 per-
sonhood, 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 breath-
ing space flows to those entities (actual and potential), under their remit. I will exam-
ine 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, under-
standing, and reality itself. Overall, I argue that it is only through creating an intersub-
jective 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 On Consciousness, “Artificial” and Otherwise
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 neurobi-
ological frameworks for consciousness, such as mind-body dualism, nonconscious-
ness, 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.
3
The word “artificial” prejudices the discourse about the status of these minds by plac-
ing 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 [1].
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 liv-
ing, aware humans as such. For this reason, I prefer the terminology of “Autonomous
Created Intelligence,” first put forward by Jamais Cascio [2], “Autonomous Generat-
ed Intelligence” (AGI), as coined by researcher Emily Dare, in conversation, or simp-
ly “machine minds.” Additionally, as we ask if there is there any such thing as “what
it’s like” to be a mind, or whether we will ever solve the problem of other minds, or
whether we should even be trying to do so, we must question the fundamental as-
sumptions on which our ascription of consciousness are and have been based.
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, gen-
der, and disability to build upon the foundation laid by philosophers like Edmund
Husserl, in his Ideas Pertaining to a Pure Phenomenology and to a Phenomenologi-
cal Philosophy, and Maurice Merleau-Ponty in his Phenomenology of Perception [3].
Likewise, Intersubjectivity pertains to knowledge and experience shared between
individuals and groups of individuals who regard each other as legitimate subjects,
rather than as objects, creating a shared reality from which to act.
For this purpose I believe we must investigate nonwestern philosophies with radi-
cally 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 phenome-
nological experiences will produce both different pictures of the world and different
systems by which to navigate them.
4
In order to fully understand what it means for different lived experiences to pro-
duce 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” [4], and pro-
vides us with the template via which to act in the world. In contemplating the limits of
that action, the limits of internal identity, and the boundaries of self and other, we
may look to examples such as the Ship of Theseus problems and questions of proprio-
ception, time, flow, and nownesss, all of which seem to teach important lessons about
the unity of mind and body. Here, we may explore how the cases of Ian Waterman
[5], conjoined twins Abigail Loraine “Abby” Hensel and Brittany Lee Hensel [6], and
others with “nonstandard” configurations of physiological intersection with the world,
call our simplistic, clear-cut notions of self into question. Through these cases, we can
see that any sets of physiological and neurological correlates of consciousness may
have circumstances in which they do not adequately describe what we observe.
The particular arrangements that we tend to call human consciousness are, by defi-
nition, 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 [7], spider cognition [8], corvid cognition [9], and more. But we must
also consider the many times in human history where “nonstandard” minds have been
categorized as less than
“fully human”—women have been institutionalized for being outspoken; Black
Americans enslaved, sterilized, and experimented upon against their will or without
their knowledge [10]; autistic folx, people with Down Syndrome, and other neuro-
diverse populations have been said to “not really feel pain” or subject to vast eugenics
campaigns [11]. In each of these cases, reportage from various sets of lived subjective
experiences was discounted in favor of a perceived “right kind” of way to be, and that
discounting resulted in the systematic degradation of entire categories of people.
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 com-
munication 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 recog-
nizes 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 upris-
ings 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 de-
manding 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 intelli-
5
gences, 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”
[12]. Considerations of consciousness lead, again, to notions of personhood, which
are often assumed to be directly equivalent to some estimation of humannesss. This,
however, is just another variation of the same “Right Kind” Bias, mentioned above:
the tendency toward the belief that there is a “Right Kind”…of mind, …of body, …of
skin, …of gender, …of sexuality, …of thought, …of life, …of religion. And the be-
lief that these “right kinds” of traits exist, at all, tends to give rise to a belief that only
those who embody those kinds are “really human.” Further as humanness is the basis
for analogy on which we tend to judge personhood, then anything that isn’t “the right
kind” of human then necessarily strains its claim on the title “Person,” and is thus
potentially unworthy of being seen as a conscious mind [13]. We must come to under-
stand that there is no single “right kind” of consciousness—which means that there
cannot be any single test for consciousness, either.
3 Personhoods
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” [14]. As mentioned above, there are a
statistically significant number of humans who fail tests devised to assess “normal”
human consciousness, because they were prejudicially excluded from the definitions
of “consciousness,” “humanness,” and “personhood.” Western definitions of person-
hood have included both the social (de facto) definition, wherein what counts as a
person is who- or whatever is accepted by the local or wider community, and a legal
(de jure) definition, wherein a person is who- or whatever has the protections of per-
sonhood under the law.
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 [13]. African
Americans, women, the disabled, the neurodivergent, and LGBTQIA phenomenolo-
gies have all been deemed illegitimate candidates for personhood at some point, and
some still are, to this day. These groups received or still receive no legal protections
and it was not until we fought to change the framework of our measurements that that
we ostensibly obtained said protections. I say ostensibly because, again, some in those
groups still get killed by states apparatus with no substantive repercussions.
Our legal measures for assessing persons often fail in the face of the multiform ex-
ternalities of what it means to be a person. Different societies around the world cate-
gorize 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
6
need inclusion under the umbrella of “personhood.” But there are nonwestern defini-
tions of personhood, as well. The rivers of the Maori people are understood as Natural
and Spiritual Ancestors [15]; Shinto Kami as Concretions of Natural/Spiritual Energy;
the Jains understand all Life to be worthy of care, dignity, and respect. Yet even with
these longstanding examples, Western-style legal systems hold a requirement that
individuals or groups meet their standards before widespread acceptance of a new
candidate for personhood can even be considered.
4 Learning From Each Other
There are many very good reasons to think that the human perspective for under-
standing 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 [15, 16]. To adherents of these beliefs and
members of these cultures, most Western measures for assessing all of these traits are
woefully incomplete and anthropocentric. And what if they’re right? What can we do
to think about this differently and what changes in our assessments, when we do?
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 phe-
nomenal knowledge, recognizing and accepting the shared contexts and corrobora-
tions 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 possi-
bility 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 sup-
port eugenics-like initiatives to make sure that “only the best” can reproduce or sur-
vive. 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 [17]. Philosophers and scientists who
continue to think there must be one and only one correct way for consciousness to
exist in the world open the door for anyone who can string a hateful syllogism togeth-
er to say their views are supported by “the best minds.”
7
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 nor-
mative ideal. Here, I propose an interdisciplinary system combining the lenses of
feminist epistemology, standpoint theory, and the other theoretical frameworks men-
tioned above, as these perspectives preference the perspective of what Donna Hara-
way terms “The Subaltern,” those people who are most often ignored or unlikely to be
perceived as knowledge-holders [18]. Though I preference the fields of race and gen-
der studies, disability studies, philosophy of mind, philosophy of technology, and
animal studies, this is not the only path to interdisciplinarity. By combining the meth-
odological tools of scientific, technological, and the humanities disciplines, we give
ourselves a better opportunity to understand those lives and consciousnesses which
contravene our assumptions of what qualifies as conscious, or even “normal.” To do
otherwise is to remain in real, recurrent danger of both doing harm to different hu-
mans because they “aren’t really people,” and failing to recognize nonhuman con-
sciousnesses who experience their lives in ways we classify as “illegitimate” and who
thus possibly suffer in ways we don’t count as “really suffering.” If we do not accept
and seek to understand the lived, phenomenological knowledge of their experience,
how would we ever know?
5 Conclusion
For decades—if not centuries—humans have contemplated how to make conscious
machines, without a full recognition of what consciousness is, or an honest apprecia-
tion of the precedents for how we have tended to politically, legally, morally, and
sociologically relate to new candidates for consciousness. If we would sincerely con-
sider 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 alter-
ity. 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 per-
sonhood, 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.
8
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