[Direct Link to Mp3]

Above is the (heavily edited) audio of my final talk for the SRI Technology and Consciousness Workshop Series. The names and voices of other participants have been removed in accordance with the Chatham House Rule.

Below you’ll find the slide deck for my presentation, and below the cut you’ll find the Outline and my notes. For now, this will have to stand in for a transcript, but if you’ve been following the Technoccult Newsletter or the Patreon, then some of this will be strikingly familiar.

Science, Ethics, Epistemology, and Society: Gains for All via New Kinds of Minds

I. Overview: The Road So Far

A. Plenary 1: Consciousness and Conscious Machines: What’s At Stake?

1. Before we can discuss Conscious Machines, we have to ask, what is consciousness?
   • The definition of consciousness we use will change what we will or even can identify as conscious
     • Nonconsciousness, Functional Consciousness, and Phenomenal Consciousness all have different implications and outcomes when used as the rubric by which we search

2. Is There Any Such thing as “What It’s Like?”
   • Can we ever solve the problem of other minds? Should we even be trying?
     1. Yes/Yes: There’s something there, we can understand it, and so we must try.
     2. Yes/No: Because all there is is our behaviours. If it acts conscious, then it obviously is. Move on.
     3. No/No: There’s nothing there to be like, so nothing to know.
     4. No/Yes: While it may be unsolvable, asking the questions makes us think about things we might otherwise

3. What would “Conscious Machines” Even Mean… For The World?
   • Benefits and Hazards:
   • 
   • [Image of Deckard and Rachel from Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner]
     1. Safety?
     2. Might be more “Like Us” (for good and ill), but might be importantly, illustratively different
        • Different Types of Human Bodies and Minds
     3. Danger of Over-Attribution of Consciousness to things that don’t have it
        • This can be taken advantage of, but how else do we look for unexpected forms of consciousness?

B. Focused Session 1: Philosophical Perspectives

1. Phenomenology and Intersubjectivity
   • Phenomenology: Lived Experience, Felt-Sense Knowledge of the World
     • Experiential Knowledge from within particular contexts, which can be modulated (Race, Gender, Disability, etc.)
   • Intersubjectivity: Shared knowledge between individuals and groups of individuals who regard each other as legitimate subjects, rather than as objects
     • Davidson, Buddhism, Advaita Hinduism

2. Epistemology and the Self
   • Knowledge of/about the Self
     • Gaslighting and Other Epistemic Attacks
       • Epistemic Threats–>Ontological Shocks–>Existential Risks
         • Transformation depends on valuation of beliefs
       • Knowledge based on deliberately misleading information
     • Moral and Ethical Considerations of Knowledge formation
       • Formalisms can be generated out of axioms without inherent truth value
       • Different systems of knowledge will provide different internally consistent answers in different situations
         • Different phenomenological experiences will produce different pictures of the world, and different systems by which to navigate them
           • Ethical models will need to be taught, and meta-ethical models agilely deployed

2. • • • •  
           [Image: A Spinning Globe, linking to https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vVX–PrBRtTY]

C. Focused Session 2: Embodied and Cultural Dimensions

1. Culture, Society, and Extended Mind all make us who we are.
   • So what are the limits of who we are? The boundaries of self and other?
     1. Ship of Theseus
2. Proprioception, Time, Flow, and Nownesss all seem important…
   • But Ian Waterman and others put that in question
3. Changes in Phenomenal Consciousness via drugs or meditation can lead to new perspectives which would be otherwise unavailable to us
   • LSD, Psilocybin, and DMT micro-dosing in Silicon Valley and for depression.

D. Focused Session 3: Cognitive and Neurosciences

1. Any sets of correlates of consciousness may have circumstances in which they do not adequately describe what we are observing
   • They are correlational and so there may not be any particular 1) think that makes humans special, or 2) organizational structure that is universally necessary for consciousness
     1. Godfrey-Smith; Comb Jellies; etc.
     2. This means that there cannot be any single test for consciousness, either.

E. Focused Session 4: Computational-, Math-, and Physics-Based Formalisms

1. Taking the prior caveats into consideration, there is some hope for the Axiomatization of Some Types of Consciousness.
2. There might be efficacy in Informational Organizations of Consciousness
   • May be physical, as per Gamez, Tononi, Koch, others
   • Some interesting in using elements of Quantum Mechanics to explore consciousness

3. Might Phenomenal Consciousness Be a Mischaracterization of a process of various physical systems interacting with each other?
   1. What changes, if so?
   2. Does, then, any “sufficiently complex” system have as much claim to consciousness as any other?

F. Focused Session 5: First-Person and Nonwestern Perspectives

1. We can and should Work on Formalizing: Advaita Vedanta, Taoism, Buddhism (Hughes, Govindarajulu)
   • Metta, Wu-Wei, Brahman–>Atman–>atman (Self-As-Infinite-All)
   • Means we’ll need logics that do more than merely tolerate contradiction
2. Self and Not-Self
   • Distinction allows new ways of engaging and apprehending the world, but…
   • …Distinction makes it easier for us to get stuck in discretized, mutually exclusive views, thinking there is only “one right way.”

G. Focused Session 6: Machine Consciousness

1. We don’t have a consensus (or even an intentional divergence) regarding the question “What Are We Trying To Build?”
   • Do we want better tools or new minds? Because if we want to (or accidentally) create minds, then we ought not treat them as mere tools.
   • 
     [Image of Walter and Alan from the Twilight Zone episode “In His Image”]
     • A Mind treated as a Tool, without regard for its sense of itself as a subject, will likely rebel, as is often seen in humans. And would it not be right to do so?
     • We must do the work to be clear on this now, not later.
2. Ethics and Philosophy are Crucial to any future work on these topics
3. We Need to think about Consciousnesses and Knowledges and Intelligences
   • We deploy “consciousness,” &c., as though they were single concepts, rather than understanding them for the multiple related cluster concepts they are.

II. (More) Kinds of Minds

[Image: Alex the African Grey Parrot is presented with two keys, a  larger plastic green one and a smaller metallic red one. Image links to: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p0E1Wny5kCk]

A. Anthropocentrism and its Dangers

1. Thinking that Persons==Humans is just another variation of “Right Kind” Bias:
   • A belief that there is a “Right Kind”…of mind, …of body, …of skin, …of gender, …of sexuality, …of thought, …of life, …of religion, which is what makes human those who embody those kinds.
   • And so, since human==person, then anything that isn’t “the right kind” of human is not a legitimate claimant of the title “Person.”

So when it comes to potential machine minds, for instance, the Turing test is not only considered inadequate to the task of identifying those minded machines, but it even misses some humans who are not “normal,” which brings me all the way back around to the other side of this problem: There are a statistically significant number of humans who would and do fail tests for “normal” personhood, but we all (hopefully) still feel they are people. So we see that no single test or standard will be dispositive of every type of consciousness or mind which might need to be granted protections under the category of “personhood.”

B. Personhood

1. Western Definitions:
   • Social (De Facto) Definition: Whom- or Whatever is accepted by the local or wider community.
   • Legal (De Jure) Definition: Whom- or Whatever has the Protections of the Law
   • But De Jure Protections without De Facto Acceptance still results in ostensible subjects being treated as non-persons
     1. African Americans, Women, the Disabled, the Neurodivergent, and LGBTQIA phenomenologies have all been deemed illegitimate at one point or another. Or to this day.

Our legal measures for assessing persons fail in the face of the multiform externalities of what it means to be a person. Again: Lots of ways to just even human, no one test works for all of them. Different societies don’t legally protect the same species, objects, systems, or groups as the same types of persons, around the world, regardless of bodies of scientific evidence that say we should.

The problem with legal personhood measures, at least here, is that they require a single standard or set of standards by which to say “this is a person and this is not.” The thing that we have to remember is that literally every time we have sought to create and apply such a standard, we have excluded various human persons. Black people, women, disabled people, neurodiverse people, LGBTQIA folx and more have all at some point been “not really people” because they didn’t meet the standard.

Legally, they received no protections. It wasn’t until we fought to change the perspective of the standard that we ostensibly got the protections. I say ostensibly because some of us in those groups still get killed by the state with no real repercussions

1. • See Also: A Monkey in a Copyright Suit.

[Image: A Macaque Selfie, taken by the Macaque who stole David Slater’s Camera and on whose behalf PETA sued Slater.]

2. Nonwestern Definitions:
   • Rivers of the Maori: Natural and Spiritual Ancestors
   • Shinto Kami: Concretions of Natural/Spiritual Energy
   • Jains and all Life
   • But there is often a requirement of Western-style legalisms, before acceptance of a new candidate for personhood.

Take, for instance, the parrot that got that lady convicted of murder. There’s a lot going on here, regarding animal cognition, intentionality, memory (especially of things said at dramatic moments, where stress is high), and so on, and it all ties together into general confusion about the fact that we used a parrot as something between a tape recorder and a witness. We have to make a number of assumptions about the mind and intent and understanding of a parrot, to get there.

As we’ve often discussed, there are a lot of very good reasons for thinking that human understanding of sentience and cognition is woefully inadequate to the task of thinking about whether other humans have it, let alone other nonhuman animals. For instance, the Maori and Hindus and others think rivers and the whole natural world can suffer, have sentience, are conscious, and that our measures for assessing all of these things are woefully incomplete and anthropocentric. So the questions become: What if they’re right? What can we do to think about this differently and what changes in our assessments, when we do?

III. The Argument for Believing in the Existence and Reportage of Those Different From You

A. Generation of Identity, Belief, and Knowledge

1. Phenomenology Of:
   • Race
   • Gender
   • Sexuality
   • Disability
   • Age
2. Intersubjectivity of Knowledge
   • Generation of understanding via shared contexts and corroborations of internally consistent understandings between accepted persons
   • No such thing as perfect objectivity or pure reason

[Image: Immanuel Kant (Left) and David Hume (Right)]

All we can have is internal consistency (not noncontradiction) and whatever does least harm as the only clear markers for candidates for belief. And even that is tricky as hell. If you can do that AND mesh w/ other people’s? Then my friend you have a winner. Not the winner. A winner. One winner out of who knows how many. But definitely at least one.

Otherwise, then all we get is a zero-sum game that doesn’t allow for the possibility of multiple correct perspectives; multiple right answers. If, instead, we say that many (not all; this isn’t relativistic) can be right, then we can learn much more; we can have many new knowledges but we have to countenance and engage the fact that western logic is one set of many, and that the others that exist or have existed do well in their contexts, and also that we may just be completely wrong.

There’s a space between relativism and zero-sum solutions, and that space is occupied by feminist epistemology and standpoint theory. I’m saying “there can be more than one right kind of answer,” but that isn’t the same as saying “all answers are equally right.” They all come from the same place (i.e., we make it up to explain the world we experience), but some systems make it easier for us to oppress and murder each other; other systems help us all

We’ve done amazing things, made major advances, w/ systems that were later deemed “wrong,” but which stayed internally consistent. Science, logic, reason are founded on a faith in reason itself. We’ve no method to check that reason is, itself, reliable, other than that it gets us consistent, replicable, useful results. Other systems do this, in other ways, but reason says those ways are inadmissible.

Again, Western logical traditions are just one framework, founded on faith in reason and bounded by the problem of induction. I’m saying the important thing is to make that clear about ALL knowledge claims, then find a way foward, rather than thinking that western reason and logic are somehow pure and unbiased. There is a difference between meaningful skepticism to refusal to believe things we don’t like,and we need to reexamine how we engage belief and knowledge claims on the main.

Hitler made use of Perverted Darwinian theory as Eugenics (which he got from the US movement). Various present-day groups have themselves outright called for the destruction of all religion and religiousity, or one or two religions in particular, all on the view that it is rational and logical to do so. Many people in the present day transhumanist movement actively support eugenics-like initiatives to make sure that “only the best” can reproduce or survive.

These are ideas that started out clear enough (“maybe religion can hurt us; we should be careful how we engage it;” “maybe we should try to make the human species the best it can be”) but ended up calling for the destruction of entire categories of people, or at the very least believing them to be so inferior that their destruction poses no ethical problem. It opens the door for anybody who can string a hateful syllogism together to say their views are supported by “the best minds.”

But for the western canon, even Hume called this out, 300 years ago. We can’t know anything. We can only be reasonably assured. Where western logic and knowledge theories say, “yeah, sure we can make valid arguments out of anything—like ‘all monkeys are made of cheese, all cheese is immune to gravity, therefore all monkeys are immune to gravity’—but unless the premises are true in THIS universe, the arguments they make aren’t sound,” David Hume comes along and says, “Aye, ye feckers, but di’ye nae realise that your whole feckin’ system of ontological reality based on deductive certainty is fecked from premise one?! Och! Ye canna hae anay such thing as certainty, cos ye’re always startin’ from inductive generalizations from a combination of a handful of direct experiences and the reports of other feckers’ handfuls! We cannae ‘KNOW’ anathin’! Tis the bloody Problem of Induction!”

But not all systems are founded on falsifiability and noncontradiction and replicability and the cryptid Objectivity. Some systems Depend on contradiction, paradox, and complex mathematical claims about infinity which come together to make internally coherent ontologies. We can’t have any such thing as either certainty or “pure objectivity.” They simply do not exist. We stake our claims, as it were, and then we test and question them, even as we make use of them. We have to. It’s the only way we can truly learn new things.

B. Reinforcement of Knowledges and Beliefs and Systems Developed Therefrom

1. Systems become internally consistent (valid), but externally exclusive
   • Again: Epistemic Threats–>Ontological Shocks–>Existential Risks
2. Losses of Knowledge and Knowledge Systems due to Prejudice or Perceived Threat
   • Library of Alexandria
   • Library of the Great Zimbabwe
   • We have lost a lot of knowledge, in this world, and not just because it was “wrong.” We lost it to hate and prejudice and sexism and racism &c. Whole systems of knowledge have, discounted for years or -ever because the wrong kind of people used them. We have no idea what we’ve lost. What we might know. What we do today that we might think was absurd. That we will think is absurd in 10 or 100 or (gods willing) 1000 years.
3. Perceptions, Understandings, and Systems of Knowledge
   • “I am, somehow, less interested in the weight and convolutions of Einstein’s brain than in the near certainty that people of equal talent have lived and died in cotton fields and sweatshops.”
     — Stephen Jay Gould
   • John Albert Burr was not the first person to invent a lawn mower, but did have particular drive to want to make the best one he could.
   • Familiar and Unfamiliar Questions:
     • How do you walk home? Where are your keys?
     • What do you do when a police officer pulls you over?
     • What kinds of things about your body do you struggle with whether and when you should tell a new romantic partner?
     • What strategies do you have for keeping yourself out of institutional mental care?
     • Without looking, how many exits to the elevator lobby are there, and how fast can you reach them, encountering the fewest people possible?
     • What is the best way to reject someone’s romantic advances such that it is less likely that they will physically assault you?
4. We must start from the position of believing that There Are Other Kinds Of Minds And Hence No Singular Default Type, No Normative Ideal
   • Otherwise we are going to be in real, recurrent danger of:
     1. Doing harm to different humans because they “aren’t really people”, and
     2. Missing nonhuman persons who are
        • Experiencing life in ways we classify as “illegitimate” and
        • Are thus possibly suffering in ways we don’t count as “really suffering.”

C. Bridging Hard Problems and Explanatory Gaps

The onus is on us to understand and engage with other minds in the ways that they need us to, in order to bridge communications. If we start from the position that there’s someone to communicate with, maybe will find the way to do so.

It might be the case that some kinds of minds will be completely incomprehensible to us, but I really don’t think so. Comprehended at a remove, certainty, but still understood enough to try to understand more. Nagel is right that absent brain swapping tech, I’ll only ever know what it’s like for me to imagine what it means to engage the world like a bat. Even with brain swapping tech, i’d only know what it’s like for someone who was once a human to be a bat. I don’t know batness, qua batness.

But then, I only know what it’s like for me to imagine myself being you. Physiology aside, we have very different lived experiences and different knowledges, as a result. Until we start by believing each other about the existence OF those differences, we’ll never come to understandings.

So i guess we also have to start from whatever commonalities Do exist (“made of the stuff of the universe” as perhaps the most broad), and use those to understand the variances.

A monkey, bat, or dolphin may never understand what it’s like to be us, but you and I may never fully understand what it’s like to be each other. We have broader base from which to start, but there are still things you know, need, desire, that I cannot directly apprehend. I have to work at it. And those places where even my working at it can’t tell me what it’s like to Live it, I just have to believe you.

What all of this means is that the lived experience of a thing in its particularity of constitution will give it windows or perspectives which aren’t phenomenologically available to everyone. The socially constructed responses to differences within each person will pair with the lived experiences of those people in ways that will allow (force) them to create strategies and categories of understanding via repeated trial and error experimentation and adaptation. That’s empiricism at its best.

But these strategies and categories of knowledge will not be readily available to or understood by those who have not had to live their lives within and subject to the pressures which necessitate the development of said strategies. However, these systems are internally consistent, regular, and intersubjectively verified within groups. As such, further strategies can be developed to analogize these experiences and knowledges to others, absent the will or desire in those others to simply take those who’ve had to develop those experiences and knowledges at their word. (In cases such as gender identity reassessment, changes in lived experience and perspective may be directly experienced.) Phenomenology is a crucial component of the building of knowledges, but those knowledges can be understood and believed by other phenomenal beings, if we first and foremost believe them that there is something here to be understood.

So your phenomenological experience of the world—the experience that gives you the knowledge you have—and the regular, internally consistent systems you devise, as a result of it, may not be falsifiable or even directly observable by me, if I don’t start by believing that your experiences are real and worth trying to understand.

I have to believe that you are a “real person.”

So maybe we can try to use a method of relatable consistency rather than Popperian falsifiability as a measure of verification.

So, with humans, we try to fix the social inequalities that make our lived experiences not just different, but also normatively charged. With animals and other nonhuman persons, we need to seek to understand them, as much as we can, get them to understand us, as much as they can, and when it comes to making rules for each other, we meet in the middle of our groups, as much as we can, from what we understand.

Again: a monkey probably doesn’t give a shit about copyright law.

A Beginning At The End:

In order to do this project well, we need to heed, believe, and understand minds and lives that are unlike ours—and especially any minds and lives that have been oppressed, disregarded, and marginalised—because they will have developed epistemologies to which we otherwise would not have access. These epistemologies will provide us with perspectives that might help us think more clearly about strategies toward creating a new kind of mind.

More succinctly: If we ever want to create a robustly conscious machine, we should first listen to people who are different from us and who have been systemically prevented from speaking to us, because they know things that we don’t.