we're gonna be talking about the notions of what it means to exist with and as technology here in the st century and opportunities for and possibilities of non human and non biological digital phenomenology x as we move forward in the world the idea of both what it means to exist in the digital as human beings in a mediated technological space but also what it might mean for things native to digital technologies to come to exist and be recognized by us as we move forward first thing we're going to do is we're going to have the panelists introduce themselves and then we're just going to get started with a few questions and this is gonna primarily be a conversation and then at the end we're gonna open it up to questions and engagement from all of you so keep track of what you're thinking throughout and anything that occurs to you just hold on to those we'll have about fifteen twenty minutes at the end to really just dig down on what you're thinking all right first and foremost i'm going to hand it over because like i said this is alphabetical i hand this over to jonathan flowers hi i'm jonathan flowers as it says up there i'm a phd candidate seven days away from my dissertation defense and trying not to panic so i generally approach machine consciousness and digital phenomenology from a american pragmatist a japanese buddhist and a queer phenomenological perspective that looks at the way in which environments shape the machine consciousnesses and are shaped by the interactions of those consciousnesses so one of the best examples of this phenomena is the bot that was developed that turned into a  misogynistic racist caricature of itself through interaction with an online environment right so the bot itself didn't emerge as that it became that through interaction with its environment and my perspective on this is any machine consciousness will suffer a similar kind of fate given the kinds of digital environments it has to play in as it were the same thing with other forms of intel of artificial intelligence so perspective on this is when we think about machine consciousness we need to think about the environments we need to think about these machine consciousness consciousnesses from their bodies as opposed to from our bodies what kind of a body or what kind of a consciousness develops when it does not have a localized body when it can be distributed across the web when the entities it encounters come with their own presuppositions that it doesn't necessarily and probably cannot share  so that's where i come from thank you and i'm emma sten i am a phd student and instructor at virginia tech i'm actually three days away from the defence of my dissertation propos substances like lsd and magic mushrooms as a way to intervene in the epistemic perspective that would name data and computable information as a bearer of truth and knowledge first and foremost i primarily com continental philosophy background i also work in a media theory and political theory i affirm an anti capitalist ethos part of my argumentation in my dissertation is that the transformation of phenomena into data can be thought as a form of bio politics political control and government governance and so at the end of the day i'm really interested in how phenomena are data fide what may not be able to be data fide in consciousness and how we can think about that when we think about replicating in computable information and that i'm still very open to new ideas and especially if people are interested in these subjects or in psychedelic research as well i'm very interested in talking to people so you can contact me yeah  and i'm robin zebrowski i'm a professor of cognitive science at beloit college i have a joint appointment in the philosophy psychology and computer science departments and i chair the cognitive science program and i my my background is i've been working in artificial intelligence theory for about twenty five years now starting from analytic philosophy casting off the shackles of analytic philosophy moving toward and through pragmatism and continental philosophy and things like that and my my interest in this question that we're talking about today comes from kind of both sides so i spent a long time asking questions about how it might be possible for an artificial creature or whatever that might look like to have phenomenology to have phenomenal experience and i also have spent quite a lot of time thinking about what it means for us as humans what does it mean for our phenomenality considering the fact that we are and always have been the kinds of things that are deeply entwined with our technologies sort of from like an andy clark kind of perspective and lately the thing that worries me include questions of presence and inter corporeality and this is what's sort of occupying my mind as i think about bot phenomenology and things like  that and i'm also extremely nervous about the fact that we don't have papers today to give to you like i feel like there's there's so much out of my control and so i'm gonna hand this over to damien who's got our i don't know about control but definitely some amount of guidance and so yeah i'm damien i'm gonna be your moderator that just means that i'm gonna be asking questions and guiding the conversation a little bit hopefully just handing it off to these three to play with and think through and do what they do because they're all really amazing at what they do which is why i brought them here to you today so my interests are in artificial intelligence i hate the word artificial in that we can talk about that later i think about non human and non biological consciousness i think about mediated engagement and technology post phenomenology the idea that we are always mediated through something i think about the idea of human biotechnological intervention which many think of as augmentation but even that word has some kinds of biasing effects when you're not necessarily augmenting you're just altering it's not necessarily better it's just gonna be different so these things are what are kind of guiding my thoughts  this and the kind of questions that i've devised and the reason that i brought this panel together so the three of you have already kind of talked a little bit about some of the things that i'm gonna be asking you about but i want to dig down first and foremost so we can what all good philosophers ought to do and let's define our terms when we talk about phenomenology when each of you individually thinks about phenomenology what is it exactly that you mean by phenomenology i have a particular thing in my mind but i want to know what each of you think about when you're thinking about phenomenological experience and i'm just gonna hand that over to the first person who looks like they might be able to  say i'm afraid the first thing that came to my mind was already in your preparatory description of phenomenology i i will start this very broadly that and say it's a philosophy of experience  over the last few days in preparation for this panel i've been considering that phenomenology as the philosophical branch that deals with the intrinsic nature of experience what it is to have experiences seems to accommodate these questions about consciousness that are very much at the forefront of what we'll be discussing today and yet phenomenology historically comes not so much from philosophy of mind where you might place it  that may make sense to more analytically focus people but i'm open to hearing other people's challenges to that and that's i think you want to do so i'm in line with emma following the tradition of phenomenology through the continental perspective except my starting place is more merleau ponty and the body and when i say merleau ponty and the body i do not mean the body as imagined as straight white male but the body a body with its particularity x things that we kind of arrogantly call disabilities or the ways in which bodies are gendered differently and how that matters in the experience of space what spaces are optimal suboptimal not even possible for some bodies what spaces are made difficult by the ways in which entities and i use this word specifically are embodied which has bearing on when we start talking about experiences an environment and these effects may be temporary they may be long lasting they may be cultivated into bodies through forms of discipline that are inscribed in society and iris marianne jung is really good about that  you haven't read throwing like a girl you probably should so that's my general approach to phenomenology it sanics it's a way of philosophically accounting for our experiences in the world by taking the body as primary yeah what he said when when john brought up the merleau ponty i was originally getting excited that i was going to get to iris marion young him and instead i didn't get to do that yeah i i think i come from a very similar perspective in that regard but i also worry about any time we use the phrase the body i've spent a lot of time worrying about that phrase the body as though there is one as though there is one experiencing subject i prefer embodiment whenever i can remember to use that instead i think it opens up a lot more possibilities of ways of being embodied different kinds of systems that might interact with the world as far as phenomenology is concerned again i see a tension between two different things on the one hand i agree with everything that  with the idea of it's the study of that first person experience in the way that it matters for consciousness but part of the problem is that that requires some kind of report ability and i worry about systems that almost certainly have experienced all states that cannot report on those and how we are able to study experience in things entities i'm gonna steal that entities that can't necessarily report on them so while i think a phenomenology is that sort of study of an emphasis on the first person perspective of experience when it comes to understanding consciousness i also think that we should at least acknowledge the fact that there are phenomenal states in creatures that cannot report them that we don't have to go to  robots at all we don't have to talk about anything synthetic we can just talk about many many animals that can't report on their phenomenal states but absolutely clearly seem to have them this microphone yes this microphone works cool y'all can keep that one so that actually brings me to something that i want to make sure that we do talk about in this the question of not just non biological but non human animal phenomenology i want to make sure that we do recognize the fact that a lot of what we're talking about here is not something that does need to be taken out to what might at this point possibly be a kind of fantastical realm of synthetic created generated and non biological  phenomenological experience but can be looked at in animals that exist today can be looked at in the ways that we've treated certain human beings and human animals in the past john you specifically brought up the you know what we arrogantly call disabilities the ti and neurodiversity engagement and theories that have been gaining traction and gaining place in discourse within the past several years looking at the ways in which people with autism ha been treated in the past people of various neuro configurations have been treated as non human or have been designated as incapable of reporting on their own  al or experiential status in the past is something that is very real and very current right right now so one of the things that i definitely want to make sure that we don't do is to think that this is a conversation that should take precedent over those experiences but it's something that can help us to think about and think through those lived in current experiences but also to make sure that we are when we think about those lived experiences that are very again current that we think about how we've dealt with those things in the past and are dealing with them now and think forward to how we might have to account for how we might deal if we encounter when we encounter a non biological entity that can perhaps not report on its own status as well as a human being might be able to desire so there's this kind of entangled conversation here that i want to make sure that we're cognizant of that we're aware of as we move forward to that end where do you think that we are as a society technologically speaking scientifically speaking where do you think that we are how would you assess where we stand in terms of this kind of constantly mediated phenomenological experience that we exist and that the nature of embodiment the nature of what it means to be embodied in this heavily digitized and digital engaged world that we exist in where does embodiment and the digital stand for us i guess i'll go so there are a couple of things that i want to engage with them that question one so we have broadly construed machine consciousnesses all around us so how many who am have has driven one of the new mazdas with the skyactiv technology in it okay so if we think about so one of the ways that we need to think about embodiment is how a machine is actually  bodied right so if we think about this from say a american pragmatist perspective say through john dewey right an entity is intelligent when it can respond to changes in its environment to the were for dewey organisms and their environments are mutually entailing so the way to go back to the mazda right the way in which the car responds to changing road conditions by altering the ability for the tires to grip through altering the the torque of the engine and the water is its world taken outside of the water it has no idea what's going on the intelligence in say a car is similar out absent a road absent driving conditions absent all this other stuff it no longer has the tools to engage with its environment you couldn't say put it in an aircraft and have it do the same kind of work so one of the things that i want to to broad answer your question is we are engaging with these kinds of things but we're doing so from a very requires systems of symbols which until a car starts communicating to me in ways that are beyond say providing dashboard indications right i wouldn't say a car is fully conscious or can communicate its interactions with the environments to me in ways that would be intelligible so one of the things that at least to answer this question and not to go on for too much longer we we  have embodied digital consciousnesses around us we just do not think of them as such because or embody digital intelligences because we tend to ground our perception of intelligence in a a jonathan i think we can push ourselves forward as thinkers of digital consciousness in general and society not not necessarily within academia or the tech industry per se by trying to spread the idea of the possibility that consciousness or intelligence cannot be delocalized i think we have this idea that there is a way that we can separate intelligence and consciousness  like we are just a brain our brain can be downloaded or uploaded somewhere we can take an animal brain or an animal mind a plant consciousness and put it into another place which would imply that context and environment and intelligence and consciousness are not necessarily mutually constitutive at all times there have been many different ways of challenging that from different traditions of philosophy which essentially are underscored by this belief that there is no such thing as i fully d localizable or decontextualize about consciousness and so no matter where you might be coming from just this this very much environmentally and i use that word very broadly just  contextualized understanding of what consciousness is i think is an important thing to consider when we talk about these issues about whether machines can be intelligent and how can they be intelligent or conscious but to challenge you a little bit i personally take issue in many important ways with the idea that machines can be conscious at all or at least data genic technologies  me the idea that anything that we sort of roughly refer to as intelligence or consciousness can be replicated encoder data and is simply something that i do not agree with and part of that has to do with the fact that systems not like knowledge or information broadly just digital data and i don't think that we can necessarily take this and transform phenomena that are that constitute intelligence o consciousness and won't go into more of what i mean by that right now and put it into these discretized and irreducible bits and bytes and for reasons that i just sort of spoke to you so ultimately i do want to push this conversation but i don't necessarily want to imply that by pushing this conversation saying that we can have digital consciousness i don't even remember what the initial question that is anymore i think i i think i agree with both of you partially i again i all tried to define what consciousness is the fact that we're ignoring that matters a lot yes i spent my life doing metaphysics work and so that's kind of where my interest lies is what must consciousness be to be the kind of thing that could possibly exist in other kinds of systems  i don't think we've come close to answering that question so i'm certainly not going to answer it but there are ways that it would rule out the very possibility there are things consciousness might be that would deny that digital systems could possibly have that trait  and i don't again i don't think we know well enough what consciousness is in order to answer that part of the question but we do know that we are the kinds of systems that are and always have been entwined with different kinds of technologies again defining technology broadly would say even language is a technology so we are and always have been deeply entwined and in part constituted by those technologies and so at least depending on the technology class that we want to talk about  those things certainly make up parts of conscious systems whether or not brains happen to matter a whole lot brains inside of certain kinds of bodies whether that's a relevant piece of the puzzle i think is still somewhat an open question i absolutely think that the bodies that that our brains happen to be in matter quite a lot for the kinds of consciousnesses that humans develop so i draw a lot on things like lay coffin johnson and the the notion of sort of embodied conceptualization and things like that the kinds of bodies that we have in some ways dictates the kinds of ways that we interact with the world and that's a serious limitation for our ability to know and communicate with other kinds of systems because even could talk we couldn't understand it and the lion shares an awful lot of our environment and and embodiment even so when we're talking about radically different kinds of systems systems that are synthetic that don't happen to start with brains we cheat with brains we know they're the kinds of things that can support consciousness we have no idea what else might and so i think that the the embodiment question matters a lot i love doing i think dewey's right on with a lot of this  but yeah i also i i have questions and worries because we have to answer that metaphysical question what consciousness could even be such that it could be the kind of thing that could start maybe in one of these kinds of systems we know that we envelop those technologies and the kinds of systems we are but i i wouldn't even know where to start with asking the other question and i think that's actually kind of a really important part you said you don't want to you don't even attempt to try to answer like the the metaphysical question i'm kind of gonna make you one of the things we're gonna do i want to talk about i want to dig down on several things that each of you have said here john you're talking about the idea of communication and like the way in which a system like the symbol representations right the systems of  representation dewey's definitions of consciousness so what if we just miss it right that's one question that i have is what if there's a system of symbols and representations that is being communicated to us there is attempting to be we just miss it or it's being communicated amongst itself or others of its type but we don't recognize it because again if a lion could talk to us we wouldn't know what talking from a lion looked like what it meant but the series of contexts and series of reference that it used to make those conversations would even like there's a whole different set of background conditions that make a lion language july in language versus a human language and the notion of what a consciousness would be is well entirely dependent upon the way in which it's entangled in its body and its about what a body is wrong what embodiment is wrong what if the embodiment of a digital system is a different type of thing than the embodiment of a biological system with its own different  entanglements what if that means that yeah it's going to be necessarily ridiculously difficult to know exactly what it says to know exactly if it's saying anything but is it its responsibility to communicate clearly or is it our responsibility to be on the lookout for that communication so i'm going to give this to him to go after that dewey claim and also i also don't want to i'm not i'm definitely not going to contradict him on d because he knows way more about doing than i did but the line i've always loved from dewey was when he said we mistook the structure of language for the structure of the world yes so i'm gonna give you this but i just want to say one more thing about what damian just said which is that notion of different kinds of embodiment i think it's super super important and it's going to structure a lot of what we're about to talk about but i would worry deeply deeply about things like notions of things like consciousness uploading i think  pure fantasy i don't think that that's ever happening things like completely virtual bodies i don't know i think that hubert dreyfus maybe is the the way to look here there's so much about that and merleau ponty right there's so much about the world that we don't know yet that we would almost certainly be missing things if we tried to replicate it in such a shallow system so i am deeply skeptical but i want to hear the i'm super skeptical skeptical of  that so presuming we actually could upload a consciousness into a digital format that consciousness would have a radically different environment with which it is an interaction and that conscious that radically different environment would mean completely different systems of symbols which ultimately comes down to you wouldn't have the same consciousness right if i could somehow be uploaded into the web my consciousness would be so massively distributed that my embodiment would be in multiple places at multiple times which would mean my environment would be so massively broad that i seriously doubt that we have the language and by language i mean the system of symbols to adequately represent that experience that is the literal limit of this kind of thing and merleau ponty would agree with that like we have no idea what the  so massively distributed would be we have no idea what those consciousness would look like so the dewey in response when i said so dewey is really really really specific about this insofar as he's talking about human interactions with the environment  my cat is not conscious to him it's intelligent but it's not conscious and this is a limitation of dewey for this conversation but i also respect that limitation insofar as if a machine consciousness broadly construed appeared tomorrow we wouldn't know it just in any real sense because we wouldn't be able to understand the ways in which it was communicating to us if it even had an environmental need to communicate to us and so it would be unintelligible ineffable to it we would be as ants are to us it's nothing i really care about us unless we're in its way somehow unless we annoy it somehow if it even notices us to begin with it all that so there is a significant portion of it constraints work that can be construed as being very much anti science he has said remarks that can be construed essentially as whatever technology is is something that always does violence to whatever we think of as natural or organic i'm science and technology techno science is a violent intervention into whatever it touches our approaches i very much agree that language is a technology and i think that this is an interesting critical hinge if we can sort of square this phenomenology approach bit consign language violence w epistemology from my perspective at least knowledge always requires some degree of abstraction into language to produce what we call knowledge beliefs are even sort of scientific knowledge falsifiable knowledge we need to put end points to more data more information we have to take masses of data and information and sort of sum them up or abstract them into language into effect but that abstraction work that allows information phenomena to be represented as language in our minds and as a something we can communicate in some ways always does violence to the entity to which it refers you know it can never perfectly represent something there are human spoken languages which have words and concepts that do not exist in other languages likewise when we try to represent certain things in certain computer languages we can't do that in other computer languages there there's always some loss enos with translation whether it's translation from like the real world into a digital photo or japanese into english something like that so if language human language computer language is a technology if this is always doing violence you know violence through lost and i don't think that we have sufficient grounds to ever say that we can fully reproduce or replicate things into what we would call a digital system and to sort of circle background to the initial provocation here we're talking about consciousness you know what it might be like to be conscious in a digital system  to me that always is going to be wrapped up in these questions of intelligence communication language i would also ask what does digital really mean when i think of digital i think of a database technology of a technology based on computable information symbols in a machine i don't know of any better definition for digital but perhaps if i had one i'd be a little bit more open to these issues of digital consciousness i'm intrigued by the the claim about language doing violence i keep coming back to and i can't remember for sure i think it was dennett and maybe in true believers where he talks about the things that language opens up for us so pre language the most you can do is like cry that you're hungry but once you have language you can be like i want to scrambled eggs side of baked beans and some really nice wheat toast and like the things that language enables beyond the obvious the ways that we are able to interact with the world with specificity in ways that are absent in the absence of language like i don't think i could think that thought of that particular desire for that particular breakfast without the language to identify those particular items and so i i don't know that i have a full pushback on the claim i'm just i'm intrigued instead by what language opens up and enables rather than closes off i i don't really mean to imply that language damages per se are always that it's it's um negating or harming phenomena i think language things in a certain way into a certain end that does some has some sort of reducing quality to it and that's not necessarily always a bad thing that allows for a certain specificity and i think that there are we could say phenomen zoar experiences that for which language is the basis so there are worlds of experience that are not accessible to us unless we have language for them to be clear about that i'm not anti language i don't think we should return to like i pre a differentiation like oceanic consciousness state all the time i don't think that would be good at all but um you know just in the same way that if i dig a ditch to put a swimming pool into the ground  that may be a beautiful thing it may make life better it may be a lake that helps the environment but it's doing some sort of violence in a sense that it's at least altering maybe that's a better word i'm altering fundamentally changing a quality of right this is actually something that dewey talks about the example of the child who learns to cry for attention where crying is no longer a natural impulse in response to an environment it is used to symbolize an active need and those processes of symbolization eventually are transformed into taste to bring it back to the conversation about machines we wouldn't be able to interpret a machine doing that unless the machine used the same system symbols that we do so which presupposes again machines communicating with us or a intentionality on behalf of a machine consciousness right to get back to again  there intentionality for the machine consciousness to even communicate with us and broadly speaking i would say no not in the sense that we are ants to it we are to it as ants are to us because again that is a broadly anthropocentric perspective that brings in particular epistemological and cultural assumptions and more that we are probably it as i don't know a cloud is other stuff like it's there but we don't bother with it because we have no means of interacting with it we just are aware of its presence ants imply something in it in the way something to be stepped on an annoyance to be exterminated which gets me back to the why would skynet care if you are so radically  disembodied in that way your perception of the world of the entities in it would be so radically different that unless you could actively recognize an entity as a problem for you continued embodied existence then you would engage with it so again it depends since we have no words to conceptualize such a radically disembodied consciousness i think it's problematic presume that this consciousness would have particular kinds of intentions towards us be it communicative violent or otherwise so the question can a machine love right what does machine love even look like right does my car love me when it applies t brakes to prevent me from running into something because if we were to associate love with a care response then yes the car cares about my existence but no i'm not sure people would go out on a limb and say yes my car has the same kind of care for me that say my mother does right so again we don't this is not a thing that we can talk about super concretely and to put it in and here's the middle ground here to put it in human terms one does violence to the experience of a machine for which we have no understanding and another one and on on this side we it can open up ways of metaphorically talking about it but only by analogy and metaphor and not concrete right now there's a few things in all of you that i want to push back on and take down in yeah moderating language as violence languages alteration language is metaphor language analogy language by its nature is taking the unmediated experience and mediating it such that other people can have a shared symbol set you say for dewey the idea of consciousness rests for humans specifically right the idea is it's about a human conscious and so your cat wouldn't be conscious my cat it's a story about my cat for the internet my cat doesn't share my same symbol sets my cat however can tell on my other cat when my other cat is up on the counter and it knows that that cat shouldn't be up there it tells this by jumping into the bed bopping me on the face yelling at me and then taking me to the kitchen and saying look see she's on the counter in non not those words because that would be awesome um but yeah  narc is apparently what like a one mabel get off the counter to dorian don't snitch but these are communications between my cat my cat and myself we don't share those symbol sets but an intentionality could be said to be there my cat also tells me when he throws up and tells me that i need to clean up the thing again how broadly do we need to share symbol sets before communication we said can be s happen and how much of again i say how much of this is incumbent on us as those things which we know are conscious and bodies and embodiments which we know are capable of consciousness in a way that we can recognize most of the time how much of it is incumbent on us to be looking out there in the world for other signs of consciousness for communications that we might not otherwise recognize inherently that might be there and distinction between signaling and communication and i actually ran into this problem in my dissertation but that's a whole other story so your cat popping you on the nose to narc on your other cat is signaling to your to you that your other cat has engaged in something problematic and bring this back to machines machine signal to us all the time check engine light fuel is low the doors ajar you know you cannot connect to this  like that and you cannot connect to this network one is a particularly good analogy because for the most part a lot of our pieces of technology are always connected if i'm going to make an analogy right the fact that a machine will continue to alert you that it cannot connect to a network could be sick or if we're gonna translate that into a human situation it's like i can't feel my arm where is the arm i'm looking for my arm i can't feel it oh you've reconnected me to this wireless network this is a different arm it has different protocols it has different ways of engaging i have limited mobility with this arm you could say similar things about resolutions on screen zip and these are all broad analogies for machine consciousness that again are metaphorical and analogous because a distributed consciousness if it lost one of the nodes to which it was distributed would it recognize this and this gets into and this is one of those things that i'm really annoyed with say the use of artificial intelligence and in combat applications distributed intelligence is running fleets of drones would that intelligence recognize the loss of a drone like i would recognize the loss of a finger or would it recognize the loss of a drone like i would recognize a flat tire while driving a car right because to be clear when we're driving cars we're embodied in those cars our embodiment just expands and we tend not to think about it like that but it so you're cat signalling machine signal to us hence why they're not conscious but if they were we wouldn't know it i want to sort of take this also back to the issue of language and alteration and violence especially with this distinction between signalling and language so i think it's important to note that there may be some unspoken presuppositions here through what i'm saying or what my co panelists and the moderator is saying um some people especially people who are big philosophy nerds either explicitly or implicitly believe that there is such a thing as experience that is prior to language a sort of originated experience or experience that cannot be touched by language or which is always going to be reduced in language several philosophers especially from my home team in continental philosophy dari odd especially when say that a language is prior to experience some language is constitu experience and you know whatever perspective you take on that it's sort of good to check your assumptions in that regard that being said if we're going to start talking about a differentiation between language and signaling and still opening the conversation up about whether machines can have experiences and what that might be like if they are signalling and they are not speaking or using language in the way humans do per se or non human animals if a cat is signaling em and they are having experiences these experiences are always going to be structured by a certain degree of instrumental reason intentionality a goal seeking behavior louis per se um i think it's important to note that especially i want to hear draw in something that we haven't really discussed yet which is that machines digital systems are part of a built environment they are constructed and usually they are constructed with a certain degree of determination whether we can make a very close to jump to economy and commerce and we talk about digital systems or at least say that they are goal oriented entities their experiences are always going to be structured to do things to have end points and i don't think that it is in the nature of the consciousness of non digital systems to be fully enveloped in this goal oriented instrumental behavior despite the way the capitalism so you got to be a lot nicer to the machines fully intentional systems i have a lot of notes but i no longer remember what they were in response to i was thinking about your oh the  thought as originating experience and i was thinking about melo ponte how he says that thought doesn't translate or sorry language doesn't translate thought it in acts it and i think there's a lot going on in that claim and i think that if we're talking about again if we're talking about artificial systems and we're talking about language there are two different things we can realize one is that we're building those systems and we get to give them the language that we want them to communicate in it's a huge advantage over lion and your cats and the the benefit of that is is again that there's at least a ochite for communication right but i also really again by the lake hoff johnson work that shows that the versions of embodiments that we have really dictate our ability to conceptualize the world and so if we're trying to front load a lot of language into an artificial system without also giving it bodies that we can recognize that work at least enough like human bodies tend to work then there's no chance that that language is actually going to become foundational conceptualization there's there's just going to be sort of you know turing test fake level conversation there's no reason to believe that minds are there i mean again i don't want to commit to what a human body looks like i think that there are wide wide varieties of human bodies but i think that the fact that we share environments and the fact that we share some forms of embodiment across individuals means that the ways that we conceptualize the world are our shared largely enough oh i think that was my other note was about about metaphor was that in fact i i agree that the the language that we use is in fact generally metaphorical and my other note oh my other note that's right my other note was about this again this notion of language is alteration and my worry here is this idea that if if we think of language is always altering some system which maybe maybe it's true and maybe that's right but it also authorizes us to think about nature as though it's the static thing without us and everything is always change i think that the the in activists in in philosophy if anybody's getting close to right on what this is it's the in activists the way that we and our environment are always go constituted and again it's that dewy line that i love so much where we mistook the the nature of language for the nature of the world because it's not like the world is out there static waiting for us to come interact with it it's instead that everything is always in change and in fact some sort of process way of viewing consciousness is probably the way forward especially if we want to think about artificial consciousness and the possibility of experience and artificial systems we've got to stop thinking about it as a thing that we have or a thing that they might have experience isn't a thing consciousness isn't a thing it's not  onoff switch there's processes that some systems engage in that can be described as conscious processes i think and i think that's actually kind of before john you you dig in on this oh it's one of the things i really want to dig in to from all of you here in our last few minutes i definitely do want to get to questions from the audience is the idea of which systems can engage those processes what's the limit what is the differentiation we have come back around to this notion of the difference between language and signaling but i don't want to be reductive here and say that language is the only kind of communication and that's signaling is an inferior or limiting kind of communication i mean if a communication is communication if the intent is there if something is trying to be transposed or engaged or exchanged between your car and you my cat and me my car and my cat like any number of things if there's a an attempt at sharing experience sharing the live processes of what i am going through with the lived experience processes of what another system going through or being or enacting in the world is that different or is it less than or what what might make it different than saying that thing is meaningfully communicating meaning fully conscious okay so just to clarify the signaling thing a signal points to an event in the world language symbolizes the event in the world and so the issue that we're having here when i say your cat is signaling it's signaling because it cannot use its vocal apparatus to say dorian has stolen x y and z go deal with him it's signaling because it can say meow meow meow meow meow meow right and we can interpret that as indicating something going on so it's the symbolization of events and so on and so forth but that's a larger conversation i wanted to get back to your question  with regards to who is doing the construction of the language and providing the means whereby communication is going on and the teleological structure of machines right so at least to go back to dewey for humans our intelligence is predicated on the abilities to see the actual and light of the possible right a machine would can address a range of possibilities that have been provided to it at least at this point provided to it by its human makers humans have the capacity of thinking about possibilities beyond those that have been provided to it through a teleological structure which we might call programming right so humans have an ever if humans have and i want to make this perfectly clear i don't think humans have a teleological structure except that which we determine for ourselves if humans have a tailless that talos is always ongoing it's always in process it's always receding right any talos we adopt as children is typically not the same talos that we adopt as adults due to our interactions with the environment or change embodiments so to your point right the teleological structure they have been given a purpose and operate within those boundaries i generally  have to learn to be human in a society that recognizes you as such it's an achievement not a given and this is mostly grounded in dewey's notion of individual predominantly social entities you learn to be a particular kind of human within a particular kind of society within a particular boundaries machines at this point do not have that option so a machine is given a purpose it's given a talos it's given a direction and that direction tends to confine it we can think of this in terms of the three law asimov's three loves right so could a and this is an interesting problem that i posted some of my students could a police robot violate the three laws in the apprehension of a subject which runs right into this teleological problem but generally i agree it's at this point it's the teleological structure that we impose upon a machine that limits  its range of possibilities but that's also tied into its embodiment so a machine reflects its teleological structure in the way that its embodied a construction robot will have particular a particular embodiment to accomplish the talos given to it  my question then would be for all of you back to the other overarching question that i asked what what would need to be done what is possible to be done as things currently stand and this is a big question for how little time we have left before i open this up to the audience as things currently stand is there a possibility for creating systems that don't sit purely within the embodiments and the and the teleological constituency is given to them to create a system that does learn change and grow not just within its rules in its language which we do give to them and which does change what they do and how they behave and what it means for them to behave in the world it incorporates human biases into what we're looking for and what we expect but is there a possibility of doing this in a way that such that those systems can grow beyond those rules those biases in a way that again and this is crucial we would meaningfully recognize because what we recognize has a long history of being spotty at best what we are willing to recognize spotty even again amongst human beings black people women artists other neurodivergent and neuro diverse populations all have a long history of not being recognized as fully human are fully conscious in meaningful ways within western society especially so we have a bad bad track record at saying x thing is not conscious therefore its experiences can be discounted and it's  portage can be discounted what would it take for us going forward to make sure we don't screw up like that in the future are you asking us to solve like the problem not you all are talking about ancestors to step on and i'm like you know i was late for a class the other day because i couldn't stop staring at the cool ants that were on my driveway actually so i'm drowning in the rain so so i think that i mean in part we have to overcome those biases that we know we have and i think that there are an awful lot that we don't know that we have yet but but is this even is it even in principle possible for us to build systems that could overcome their programming in such a way that they grow to be you know beings of some sort i mean our children certainly overcome our programming right i have a three year old and i can tell you that nothing i try to tell him to do does he do but he has overcome all of my i'm trying so hard to program him and it is not  working and so all of us i think i have overcome our programming to some extent depending on what we consider our programming we we think about the the ways the things that we were taught growing up and saying think about ways that you've rebelled against those things that you were taught growing up i mean i was raised by a very racist father and i hope i've overcome a lot of it but again it's it's we have overcome our own programming to try and do better than what we were given and i think that there's no reason in principle that i mean we have algorithms and things that overcome their programming all the time they surprised us they if you have a computer you know they surprise you they don't do the things you want them to do right and there are much more complicated systems being built all over the world really which are being built with the goal of overcoming their programming or you know evolutionary algorithms all kinds of things and there seems to be in principle no reason that we can't build systems that exceed what we've given them neural nets in general deep learning in general we don't know how those systems work there they're not at all programmed by us they're programmed by themselves the question of whether we could recognize that system as a possibly intelligent system i think that's the question and i think that we need to look there at embodiment and we need to look at shared cultural social physical environments in order to be able to understand those other kinds of creatures because again ants have such a wildly different cultural social environment that we still don't recognize them as having any kind of intentionality whatsoever but watch an ant colony for a while they're depends on our ability to recognize that things overcoming its programming is a product of its interactions with its environment and how it overcomes its programming will appear differently based on the different environments so if again to take a metaphor i would i would say that a mac would achieve a different sort of consciousness than a pc then my playstation then my xbox given the different affordances of the say embodiment of those artificial intelligences right so i would say that it's not can we get to that point it's if we got to that point would we recognize it and would we be able to recognize the plurality of intelligences that happened and again these intelligences would be so radically different from our ourselves that it would be really difficult to recognize them and the real question is are there are there machine intelligences that we would want broadly construed to overcome their programming if somebody and i like going back to a military example because it brings it right on home or medical robot for example would you want to say in ai runnin a surgery suite to overcome its programming right would you want a self driving car to overcome its programming right and the only reason we can ask these questions is unlike children who he recognized as autonomous and going on in life at some level we're thinking about overcoming programs as a tool overcoming its intended purpose and if we're gonna talk about intelligent machines we need to not talk about them as tools crap because that way skynet lies if the history of slave rebellions or social change has taught us anything when you treat an intelligent or conscious entity as a tool it ultimately does bad things to those people who treat them as t i'm gonna pick up on the political angle here and reaffirm damian determining or understanding an entity is being capable of consciousness and experience or not is a fundamentally political question absolutely  pursuant to that how we can do better you know in a hypothetical where machines do have consciousness and experience and yet we treat them the way that we have treated and slaved  peoples or people's against which we have committed genocide yes okay it could happen and we should try to be better so that we don't inflict unnecessary suffering at the same time speaking of ideals of justice of best action of a sort of perfector perfectible ethics is a really new liberal formulation you know i think at some level they're always going to be power differentials whenever we're dealing with different entities that have consciousness  so that's not a resolution by any means i think if anything is just an injunction to think that these questions of what can and cannot have consciousness they're not very different from our questions of human rights or animal rights they're actually very much in the same  one of the things that we haven't gotten the opportunity to talk about specifically is phenomenology x of gender race ability physical constituency but all these things matter deeply to how we will assess  non biological phenomenological assertion in the future the affordances that i have given to the people in this room and the people in this city are different the affordances that the women in this room have to the men in this room the non binary people in this room to the gendered people in this room they're different their experiences their engagements and exchanges with the world they're different experiences and they constitute their consciousness differently in much the same way that john was talking about we have consciousnesses plural there is no singular mode of consciousness and the question for us is i think here at the end are we willing to accept that a plurality of consciousnesses and are we willing to do the work to find that shared ground to engage it that's pretty much the last thing i have to say i'm gonna open it up to all of you we have about ten minutes left and i'm crap ton of hands all right hum i saw you first i'm just gonna bring this over to you okay um i really like the point you finished on which was about this blue rare blue reality of consciousnesses and something i think about which i i'm surprised i often gets kind of left out of the conversation is smart objects and a more kind of object oriented approach and talking about kind of rhetorical situations in which we are not primary so we have like very good case examples i find i guess i'm a person who comes from a background in psychology cognitive science and then i went into and then i worked in tech and then i went to science and technology studies so and i find it really weird when like not not weird but maybe not productive or maybe not correct when people are talking about these kind of human consciousness creations like we have lots of different forms of intelligence around us that were we could kind of be testing with or thinking with kind of case examples and i think thinking about a smart home a smart object and ambient intelligence that is kind of just there to collect everything and not not purposefully kind of directed towards a certain kind of data or a certain kind of information it's just collecting everything and providing you with like a kind of blanket of intelligence i think these situations might be good to think with and just to make it specific so i can finish this i think about kind of a smart home in which your little companion robot talks you're like thermostat and then you're not in this nobody cares about you in this situation those two things are talking to each other with their own infrastructure that might be human designed but still like how do we how do we talk about or think about situations that we're not we're not involved in and we don't matter like these situations already here we don't matter between that conversation so i would say that we do matter where the were the whole reason they're there gathering that data i think that we're otherwise way over anthropomorphizing their abilities and goals and desires or anything like that to imagine it's anything other than that  i think that there's a ton to be said about smart homes devices like this a ton to be said about them but i don't think that i would at least put the label of intelligence on them in any way they may act way i actually think that there's there's an interesting conversation there but i worry so much about what happens if we start assuming that these devices that we know are super limited not really very intelligent at all like i don't i haven't had a roomba for a while but my roomba couldn't actually get off the carpet ever it was it was terrible we were like this is the worst robot ever like i would worry about if we start attributing to them agendas and intelligence and things like that because they are tools and they're tools for us they don't have their own agendas at this point i do agree with that and i would say that we are again we are in that conversation because the whole reason they're communicating is for what to maintain a context for us right so a roomba would talk to the house is the house notice that the carpet was dirty because humans prefer clean spaces so on and so forth right so the intentionality there is our intentionality not it's intentionality except in a purely sense but they are talking without us but for us so we're present in the conversation even if we're not the subject of the conversation we so to put it in object oriented philosophy right a human is a hyper object to any smart device it is the thing that fundamentally affects the way it is in the world and cannot escape we are a hyper object to every smart device regardless of whether or not it is directly interacting with us because it can't get away from us and we fundamentally determine whatever is going on all right so for the non object oriented philosophers in the room a hyper object is like a black hole right it affects it warps everything around it  waste is a kind of hyper object gender is a hyper object even when we start talking about in sexuality is a hyper object it's the thing that organizes particular kinds of things whiteness is a giant hyper object for example but yeah profit motive also i don't think we can forget the fact that the data that they gather and the basis for their communication is always bound up in human intentionality in a very very explicit and relatively narrow way so perhaps even if that changes in the future though you know what robin and dhunda said absolutely stands and also just stem if anybody is interested in this idea of hyper objects timothy morton that's the name you need to know i think you know it's it's a cool thing to bring here hi so in addition to recognizing digital entities as conscious or intelligent is there the possibility of recognizing them is recognizing them as ethical subjects even absent that  is recognizing them in the way we've been talking about as intelligent as communicating prerequisite the thing has to be human before it can be ethical so we like to impose our ethics upon non human things and presume that they share them somebody would say my cat is unethical for killing a mouse or wounding it such that it calls its brethren out so that she can kill the rest of them and if we were to do that in war it would be problematic we have laws against that kind of thing so for a machine to be ethical we would have to put it within the context of the human social environment which presumes the machine shares the human social environment which i don't think the machine would unless we have given it a teleological structure that says you got to share this social environment so this gets us into weird things like is a machine culpable or is a self driving car culpable if it hits another person to save the life of its driver  the programmer is culpable but that's merely you know that's a complicated issue but i would say you'd have to implicate the machine the conscious machine in this case within our social structure to hold it responsible to any ethical or moral structures that we might come up with there's so very this could be a seven day workshop on its own yeah  yeah so so i was recently at a conference robo philosophy where we did a panel on robo ethics and i instead of even really answering much of your question i would just say it needs to even be refined more to ask what it needs to even be refined more to ask questions about whether you're wondering about ethical subject ethical patient ethical agent different ways of defining what that machine might what role that machine might play because certainly already those machines play roles in our ethical systems whether that whether any given machine could possibly be an ethical agent i think is a way messier question and i think that we have no machines at this point that we have any reason to believe are likely to develop agency in this way but they also are unlikely to develop agency full stop right so i think that there's an overlap there with the ethical question but there are certainly machines that we treat as ethical patients in certain ways if i walk over and kick your laptop really hard that's going to be a little different than me walking over and kicking this empty chair really hard so we treat certain things differently and they have a different ethical status already but they aren't agents in our ethical systems i i don't have anything to add all right we have time unfortunately for just one more question  to go back to this i'm sorry so when we were talking about signaling versus the use of language there was a lot of abstract discussion and i think i might want to use a more concrete example to ask the question that i'm asking so what would be the difference between a cat who or damien i think it's your cat specifically taking you into the kitchen and jumping on a counter and being like this other cat is behaving badly or a car flashing lights and you're not sure why and this is gonna be kind of bad guys so just get ready for it an autistic child in in the kitchen jumping up and down vaguely gesturing towards the fridge but you can't really be sure that that's what they're gesturing towards where do you draw the line with the signalling and language there because i would say that that kid or person with autism is communicating something very clearly duii doesn't say that signaling is not communicating let's let me put that way out of the way dewey does not say that signaling is not communicating it's not language because it does not symbolize experience so jumping up and down to  or to communicate hey over here is taking an activity that we would do in a natural situation eg jumping over a stream and using it to symbolize a different sort of thing like if i were to sneeze and say like that's crap right i am taking a sin activity that i do in a natural situation and using it to symbolize something else that is what language does signaling points directly to a thing now the issue was signaling  that you're pointing out with the the child with autism with the flashing lights with the cat is exactly the distinction language allows us to make ideas clearer it allows us to symbolize particular things signaling does not have that kind of precision so flashing lights right i can put my warning lights on while sitting on the side of the road and nobody has any idea why i'm doing it my car could be broken down i could be on the phone ordering a pizza i could be trying to take a nap whatever and what kind of flashing lights are the things you need to attend to are different from flashing warning lights are different from flashing my bright somebody in terms of where we make those cut points the factors that we take into consideration i myself i'm sure my co panelist and anybody really having this conversation who would think to have it is extraordinarily complex of any human being any animal being necessarily mean a certain thing becomes a very different sort of question you know just distinguishing between machine and not machine life um above and beyond that um i'm not necessarily sure that it's meaningful to speak of making cut points that refer to one general situation or another and i'm also not necessarily duelist myself so i i don't you know i can't speak in the same vein as jonathan and you know again to not really resolve the question i think it's really it is actually really important to bring questions of language and accessibility whether it's in terms of cognitive differences or disabilities different states of human development into this and it's hard to ask those questions because they often come with problematic implications so you know thank you for a certain bravery of saying it that way even though um it can quickly slip into territory that is like very offensive at the same time accessibility yeah well disability studies um you know which is part of the context in which damian and i met i think all of us sort of have some intersection there is a really really interesting place to draw this in to accessibility what about human minds that cannot conceive of language in the same way my twin brother is autistic and why i've brought us all here today is we have to think about the fact that there are certain human beings and certain human sets of lived experience that we have excluded from the conversation of consciousness before and we have to be willing to own that and to say we still do that and we need to think about what the implications of that might be into the future ultimately i just want to thank all of you for being here thank you all for saying the things that you said thank our panelists please once again you can find all of these people on the internet please do they're wonderful to know and to think with thanks