Post 23: What the hell is consciousness anyway? Part 1: Dualism

Okay! As promised, the first in the weekly series on theories of consciousness. I’ve given this some thought since I rashly promised this last week, I now think this wasn’t as terrible an idea as I first thought after I made the promise and then reread the list of theories. . .. It definitely should give us some tools to talk about what an AI consciousness might look like when I finally finish and publish my post about how LLMs are trained and function.

I picked Dualism to start with as I sort of thought it would be low-hanging fruit. Something most people are familiar with at least somewhat. . . maybe not very complicated. . . of course, once I started the discussion it became apparent quickly that nothing is simple. ChatGPT is filled with all sorts of theories of Dualism and ideas as to how they relate to consciousness. So, I don’t know how deep these discussions are really going to go, (without them being a hundred pages long). I think they will likely end up as overviews with some general thoughts about how the theories relate to AI consciousness and each other as we go through them.

For now see the discussion below: we mostly settled on “Property” Dualism to discuss, (boiled down, it seems like an argument for “the whole being greater than the sum of its parts”). I eliminated “substance” dualism, or the idea that “the idea that the mind and body are completely distinct substances,” as ChatGPT phrases it in the discussion, mostly because it just doesn’t seem tenable to me in light of what we have seen when, say, someone gets a brain tumor or a traumatic brain injury and their personality changes. So, apologies if that appeals to you. . .