Consciousness and artificial intelligence Heidegger, Searle and Bostron

Abstract

The issue of whether artificial intelligence systems could potentially develop some form of consciousness or self-awareness is a subject of ongoing debate in the fields of philosophy, cognitive science, and computer science. Some authors such as Bostrom, Chalmers, Minsky, Hassabis, and Kosinski argue that consciousness is a property of certain complex information processing systems and that under certain circumstances, they could reproduce the necessary processes to generate a type of "artificial consciousness". Others, such as Searle, Penrose, and Dreyfus, argue that it is an exclusively human phenomenon with a biological correlate and that consciousness could not emerge in a machine. However, with the disruption caused by large language models and other self-generative technologies, this dispute seems to be unable to be resolved with a categorical answer. This paper argues that certain semantic aspects of the term must be resolved first in order to be extrapolated to non-human entities.