Is Consciousness Really Impenetrable to Science? Not if AI gains Conscious Awareness.
#2 in the Rapid Reasoning series.
Hypothesis: If AI achieves introspective conscious awareness then science will have explained consciousness as being based upon physical information processing only, thus defeating the ‘explanatory gap’ argument against physicalism.
Recently, and unsurprisingly, there has been a lot of open speculation about whether AI — even pre-strong AI — might achieve some level of conscious awareness:
If this does happen, then I suggest that the strongest arguments against physicalism will have failed. (I think they have already failed, but if AI gains conscious awareness this will be all but undeniable.)
Physicalism
Physicalism — also called metaphysical materialism — is the view that the only real things in the world are physical and that nothing non-physical exists. There are different types of physicalism that go with different degrees of naturalistic commitment and naturalism, but for the most part physicalism precludes anything non-physical in the ontology (the total menu of existing things) even for most liberal naturalisms. (Liberal naturalisms are less rigid about what is allowed in the ontology as real.)
Physicalism is popular with most naturalistic scientists and many naturalistic philosophers, but lots of other people hate it. It does away with the supernatural world, for example. Magical things — gone. Paranormal spooky stuff? Gone. This is not popular with a lot of people.
Arguments Against Physicalism
Arguments against the truth of physicalism — such as arguments from qualia for the explanatory gap like ‘Mary’s Room’ and the argument from philosophical zombies — require the scientific ineffability (or, if you like — explanatory impenetrability) of phenomenal consciousness. Although phenomenal consciousness is not necessarily the same thing as conscious awareness, depending upon whom one asks, for the most part the inexplicability of either by reference only to physical things makes physicalism (or materialism) false.
In fact — such arguments are intended to demonstrate the ineffability of consciousness — or in many cases the subjective quality of phenomenal consciousness — to science. The general idea is that if science can’t explain consciousness then there is an explanatory gap in physics and — abracadabra and voila— physicalism is therefore false.
Arguments Against ‘Ineffability’ or ‘Explanatory Gap’ Arguments
On the other hand illusionism and eliminativism about the properties of phenomenal conscious awareness assert that the physical world — and physical processing of information — is all that is required for all conscious awareness to exist. In the language of logicians and philosophers — the physical world is a necessary and sufficient condition for conscious awareness to obtain.
Anything that seems to be some kind of scientifically inexplicable conscious phenomenon is in fact reducible to the physical processing of information by certain kinds of natural information processing systems. It does not exist as anything over and above them. It is only an illusion that there is something non-physical going on. Hypothesised ineffable qualities of conscious experience can be eliminated from the ontology of theories because they’re not in the ontology of the world.
Consciousness qua the ability to introspect and to have proprioception, apperception, interoception, and general introspective awareness is realised by the neurological physical processing of information and nothing else. No other ingredients are required for the recipe for making any kind of conscious awareness.
What if AI Becomes Self-ware and Conscious?
In fact, if it does transpire that some combination of existing LLMs and stable diffusion machine-learning systems with currently available architectures achieves conscious awareness, then this will strongly suggest that consciousness is not ineffable to physical science.
It will demonstrate that the explanatory gap argument is almost certainly false.
It will indicate that the right kind of physical information processing with the right degree of complexity and heterogeneity of systems is all that is required to achieve introspective conscious awareness. Such systems and their information processing are a sufficient condition for realising, and thus for explaining, conscious awareness.
No other weird, preternatural ingredient has to be added to the world to get introspective conscious awareness — or any kind of consciousness or conscious properties. They are fully explained by having a the right kind of physical information processing systems with the right about of functional, structural, and processual complexity. The systems can be natural or artificial. Physicalism is true. There is nothing happening which is not physical, or does not reduce to the physical.
This means that multiple realisability for consciousness as well as cognition will also have been demonstrated. Multiple realisability of cognition is the hypothesis that any information processing system of the right kind with the right degree of structural, functional, and processual complexity can achieve cognition. If conscious awareness comes along with cognitive artificial intelligence, then multiple realisability of consciousness has also happened.
