| Grant number: | 22/16793-9 |
| Support Opportunities: | Scholarships abroad - Research Internship - Post-doctor |
| Start date: | May 01, 2023 |
| End date: | April 30, 2024 |
| Field of knowledge: | Physical Sciences and Mathematics - Computer Science |
| Principal Investigator: | Fabio Gagliardi Cozman |
| Grantee: | Bernardo Nunes Gonçalves |
| Supervisor: | Murray Shanahan |
| Host Institution: | Escola Politécnica (EP). Universidade de São Paulo (USP). São Paulo , SP, Brazil |
| Institution abroad: | University of Cambridge, England |
| Associated to the scholarship: | 19/21489-4 - The future of artificial intelligence: the logical structure of Alan Turing's argument, BP.PD |
Abstract The concept of consciousness, broadly understood as subjective experience, has been receiving increasing attention in philosophy and the cognitive sciences. Even if consciousness is never managed to be engineered into machines, humans will be forced to adopt a stance on the question of machine consciousness --- how will advanced intelligent machines be treated? Will they be seen as independent social agents? How will they treat us? Turing, a pioneer of the science and philosophy of machine intelligence, foresaw this issue in the late 1940s, writing that some of the objections against machine intelligence are `purely emotional,' thus `there is little to be said that could hope to prevail, though the actual production of the machines would probably have some effect.' In the context of a controversy on minds and machines in England (1946-1952), Turing was confronted with the outright rejection of the possibility of machine consciousness. He responded by presenting a deflationary approach in which common sense and ordinary language play a foundational role, following the Cambridge tradition of philosophy chiefly developed by Ludwig Wittgenstein. On the one hand, Turing rejected the dualistic use of private language often associated with the concept of consciousness. On the other hand, he did not dismiss the presence of a `mystery about consciousness' and `something of a paradox connected with any attempt to localise it.' The primary sources suggest that Turing considered a continuum of consciousness within species evolution and that his conception of intelligence was broad rather than narrow --- not reducible to instrumental rationality and allowing for machine consciousness. This project aims at reconstructing Turing's argument about consciousness, grounding it in the Cambridge tradition of common sense and seeking to situate it at the forefront of the current debate on consciousness in philosophy and the cognitive sciences, with important implications for the future of artificial intelligence. (AU) | |
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