Philosophy Vessel Forum
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Philosophers such as David Chalmers insist that a physical model of consciousness is incomplete without an explanation of how the mind generates subjective experience. Chalmers further insists that all of our current explanations for experience fall short because there is a disconnect between neural oscillations or the firing of synapses and the feeling of melancholy or bliss. Is it likely that we will bridge this “explanatory gap,” as Chalmers puts it, solely through physical phenomena? I.e; can we ever satisfactorily describe experiences in terms of the physical processes that may or may not produce them? If not, then what would a potential explanation of conscious experience resemble, and in what manner could it be visualized?
I don’t think physical phenomena are enough to bridge the explanatory gap. Attempts to model consciousness with mathematical and scientific models rely heavily on such physical phenomena, ignoring or dismissing the phenomenon of experience completely. Perhaps, (though I don’t believe it) subjective experience can be reduced to a purely physical state. But I think there’s more to it than that.
Take philosophical zombies. They seem, in every way, as human as we are. They can take in similar external, physical stimuli and exhibit the same behaviors and reactions. The sole difference is that they lack conscious experience. Yet, from a physicalist standpoint, we cannot explain why they seem human without actually being conscious. The argument that follows from Chalmers is that, since the idea of a philosophical zombie is conceivable, the explanatory gap persists and cannot be resolved through physicalist theories. (Say, what if you’re a zombie?)
Artificial intelligence is like our modern, sophisticated manifestation of philosophical zombies. AI is trained in a way that mirrors human cognitive development and nature. We can provide a machine with the same experiences, stimulating it to learn and become more intelligent as a human (voila, machine learning!). We can extend Chalmers’ argument to AI — the better zombies. We can see how it replicates human behavior. It “experiences” its “physical” environment — the data we train it on. In this case, can we consider AI as being able to consciously experience physical phenomena like we do? Can we say the way it experiences is, or can come to be, the essential human experience?
Nowadays, with the rapid rise of AI, you can find a lot of debates about whether AI is truly intelligent or conscious, or about its potential to become so in the future (see the foundational Turing Test and Searle’s Chinese Room Argument). The development of AI intricately intertwines with philosophical arguments on human nature. I think the problem of conscious experience as a whole requires more insights and perspectives from across fields, and especially beyond the simple physicalist viewpoint.
