Why Computers Can’t Be Conscious
The limits of Science, Arguments from Philosophy
Humans have transcended their biology from the aggregate of cells they are made up of and transformed it into something profoundly different. Yet it is baffling how the advances and influences of modern neuroscience led its practitioners to squeeze the wonder of human nature into a brain and how computer scientists further transduced the brain into the logic gates of silicon circuitry.
“Because humans have “input” in the form of the senses, and “output” in the form of speech and actions, it has become an AI creed that a convincing mimicry of human input-output behavior amounts to actually achieving true human qualities in computers.”—Ari Schulman
Scientists get away with this metaphysical murder because the technologies they develop are so practically useful. (Tallis 2014.) It is astonishing how a herd of philosophers succumbs to the glory of neuroscience and gives those reductionists a helping hand.
The entertainment media, through films like Her and Ex-Machina, turns this folly into future likelihood.
This essay concerns popular “neuro” intellectual fashions, stretching from biologistic to computer pseudo-science. It also answers many of the questions and valid criticisms surrounding an essay I published…
