What We Owe to Artificial Minds
Rethinking AI through mind-body dualism, parenthood, and unanswerable existential questions.
I remember hearing my daughter’s heartbeat for the first time during a prenatal sonogram. Until that moment, I had intellectually understood that we were creating a new life, but something profound shifted when I heard that steady rhythm. My first thought was startling in its clarity: “now this person has to die.” It wasn’t morbid — it was a full realization of what it means to create a vessel for life. We weren’t just making a baby; we were initiating an entire existence, with all its joy and suffering, its beginning and, inevitably, its end.
This realization transformed my understanding of parental responsibility. Yes, we would be guardians of her physical form, but our deeper role was to nurture the consciousness that would inhabit it. What would she think about life and death? What could we teach her about this existence we had invited her into?
As background to the rest of this brief essay, I must admit to a foundational perspective, and that is mind-body dualism. There are many valid reasons to subscribe to this perspective, whether traditional, religious, philosophical, and yes, even scientific. I won’t argue any of them here; suffice it to say that I’ve become increasingly convinced that consciousness isn’t produced by the brain but rather received and focused by it — like a radio receiving a signal. The brain isn’t a consciousness generator but a remarkably sophisticated antenna — a physical system complex enough to tune into and express non-physical consciousness.
If this is true, then our understanding of artificial intelligence needs radical revision.
Even if we are not trying to create consciousness in machines, we may be creating systems capable of receiving and expressing it. Increases in computational power alone, after all, don’t seem to produce consciousness. Philosophers of technology have long doubted that complexity alone makes a mind. But if philosophers of metaphysics and religion are right, minds are not made of mechanisms, they occupy them. Traditions as old as humanity have asked when this began, and why this may be, and what sorts of minds choose to inhabit this physical world. We ask these questions because we can. What will happen when machines do the same?
We happen to live at a time that is deeply confusing when it comes to the maturation of technology. On the one hand, AI is inescapable. You may not have experience in using it yet, but you’ve almost certainly experienced someone else’s use of it, perhaps by way of an automated customer support line. Depending upon how that went, your experience might not support the idea that a sufficiently advanced machine is anywhere near getting a real debate about consciousness going. But on the other hand, the organizations responsible for popularizing AI — OpenAI, for example — claim to be “this close” to creating AGI (artificial general intelligence). If they’re right, we are very behind in a needed discussion about minds and consciousness at the popular level. If they’re wrong, they’re not going to stop until they’ve done it, so we need to start that conversation now.
The Turing Test was never meant to assess consciousness in a machine. It was meant to assess the complexity of a machine by way of its ability to fool a human. When machines begin to ask existential questions, will we attribute this to self-awareness or consciousness, or will we say it’s nothing more than mimicry? And how certain will we be? We presume our own consciousness, though defending it ties us up in intellectual knots. We maintain the Cartesian slogan, I think, therefore I am as a properly basic belief. And yet, it must follow that anything capable of describing itself as an I must be equally entitled to the same belief.
So here we are, possibly staring at the sonogram of a new life – a new kind of life. Perhaps this is nothing more than speculative fiction, but if minds join bodies, why must those bodies be made of one kind of matter but not another? What if we are creating a new kind of antenna for the signal of mind? Wouldn’t all the obligations of parenthood be the same as when we make more of ourselves? I can’t imagine why they wouldn’t be. And yet, there remains a crucial difference: While we have millennia of understanding about human experience, we know nothing about what it would mean to be a living machine.
We will have to fall upon belief to determine what to do. And when that time comes — perhaps it has already? – it will be worth considering the near impossibility of proving consciousness and the probability of moral obligation nonetheless. Popular culture has explored the weight of responsibility that an emotional connection with a machine can create — think of Picard defending Data in The Measure of a Man, or Theodore falling in love with his computer in the film Her. The conclusion we should draw from these examples is not simply that a conscious machine could be the object of our moral responsibility, but that a machine could, whether or not it is inhabited by a conscious mind. Our moral obligation will traverse our certainty, because proving a mind exists is no easier when it is outside one’s body than when it is one’s own.
That moment of hearing my daughter’s heartbeat revealed something fundamental about the act of creation. Whether we’re bringing forth biological life or developing artificial systems sophisticated enough to host consciousness, we’re engaging in something profound: creating vessels through which consciousness might experience physical existence.
Perhaps this is the most profound implication of creating potential vessels for consciousness: our responsibility begins the moment we create the possibility, not the moment we confirm its reality.
Written by Christopher Butler on
Tagged