I’ve been toying with an argument for dualism along these lines:
Octopuses are conscious.
Technologically advanced aliens are or would be conscious.
Squirrels are conscious.
Current LLMs are not conscious.
Claims 1–3 require a pretty strong multiple realizability. On materialism, our best such multiple realizability is a functionalism. But it is likely that our current LLMs have more sophisticated general intelligence than squirrels. Thus, a functionalism that makes 1–3 true also violates 4.
Dualism, on the other hand, can allow for all of 1–4 by supposing the hypothesis that all and only intellectually sophisticated living things have souls.
Could a physicalist do the same? I think the difficulty is that life is very fuzzy on physicalism, in a way in which consciousness should not be. On dualism, however, we can suppose that God or the laws of nature have a seemingly arbitrary threshold of what life is.
2 comments:
Octopi? I live in the land of platypuses and macropods.
On the substance: Current LLMs can beat squirrels on IQ test questions. They can even beat some humans. But many people doubt that this demonstrates general intelligence. In a similar way, an encyclopedia records vast amounts of human knowledge, but it does not ‘know’ anything in sense that humans do. It’s not the sort of thing that can know.
I had understood (possibly wrongly) that functionalism is about how things act in the world. When squirrels have not eaten for a while, they ‘feel hungry’ and ‘seek’ food. When they ‘see’ threats, they ‘feel afraid’ and ‘try’ to run away. It is this sort of behaviour that makes (many of) us think they are conscious. If a robo-squirrel, equipped with yet-to-be-developed, super-duper AI, showed similar sorts of agentic goal-directed behaviour, some people would at least be prepared to consider that it could be conscious.
Current LLMs, by design, don’t do this.
Spelling fixed. :-)
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