Artificial Intelligence is not just an engineering discipline, but also the most fascinating and important philosophical project ever attempted: the explanation of the mind, by recreating it. This part of the series "From Computation to Consciousness" focuses on the nature of the self, agency and identity.
When we recognize the paradigm of Artificial Intelligence as a philosophical and scientific framework for understanding the nature of minds like ours, we may begin with an essential question: What does it mean for a machine to feel? How do emotions arise at the intersection between a self and its world—or more precisely, within an a reflexive self model, in response to being dynamically reconfigured by a motivational system, in response to shifts in its alignment to a model of its environment, all within the same mind?
This inquiry takes us to the core of our own psychological architecture. Who are we when our self-perception alters? What does it mean to depersonalize, to dissolve the boundaries of the self? Can we reverse engineer, debug and reconstruct our identities to become who we want to be? Is there free will? Is it possible to recreate self and sentience in nonbiological substrates? Can AI be conscious? Could we perhaps even extend our own self to non biological substrates?
This presentation is part of the philosophical series “From Computation to Consciousness,” which draws on insights from AI and cognitive science to explore the nature of intelligence, consciousness, and their realization in the physical universe.
Licensed to the public under http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
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