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CogX 2018 – Being a Beast Machine: Consciousness, AI, and Life
Anil Seth, Professor of Cognitive and Computational Neuroscience and Co-Director, Sackler Centre for Consciousness Science, University of Sussex
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#cogx18 (edited)
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I agree that the perception of self is (in his terms) a 'controlled hallucination', but so too is the body, brain, and the physical world. In our attempt to purge our view of nature of anthropocentric and subjective bias, we have instead unknowingly embraced the inverse bias of mechanemorphism and anti-subjectivity (nilipsism). When we assert as a given that the brain is generating consciousness, or that a computer really is "playing" a game, we are succumbing to the fallacy of begging the question, which prevents us from considering other frameworks for explaining the relationship between subjective appearances in consciousness and objective appearances in consciousness. Once we understand that we cannot say that any part of our experience is a controlled hallucination without also undermining the authority of that conclusion itself as a controlled hallucination, then we can gain a more accurate view of the absolute primacy of consciousness as it defines not only perception of the world and the self, but of all possible appearances, ideas, truths, etc. The hard problem of consciousness runs deeper than biology and even physics, and I think that the failure to appreciate that is leading us toward an unscientific naivete toward AI…which I would say is the ultimate rubber hand.