Date of Award
Fall 12-17-2024
Document Type
Honors Project
Degree Name
Bachelor of Arts
Department
Classics, Philosophy, and Religion
Department Chair or Program Director
Mentore, Laura
First Advisor
Reno, Michael
Major or Concentration
Philosophy
Abstract
Since 1950, when Alan Turing first posed the question of whether a machine could think, the possibility of artificial consciousness has sparked intense and ongoing debate, and strong positions have been staked out on each side of the argument. On the one hand, the historically popular functionalist school of thought claims that any system capable of producing suitably “conscious” behavior in a given environment should be considered conscious. On the other hand, John Searle’s famous “Chinese Room” argument insists that this cannot be the case, and that consciousness is in all likelihood not artificially reproducible. However, both positions have issues—the functionalists are forced to ascribe consciousness to a much too wide array of systems, and Searle must rely on his unsubstantiated “causal properties” to deny the possibility of conscious artificial intelligence. These issues give rise to middle-ground positions such as that of Paul and Patricia Churchland, who in 1990 expressed their optimism at the prospect of neural network technology someday achieving consciousness. Today, modern advancements in AI technology and research into large language models give us new and important insights into this debate. Recent research from the AI company Anthropic shows strong parallels between conceptual representation in LLMs and the human brain, supporting the notion that a sufficiently advanced neural network may be capable of achieving consciousness thought. This paper analyzes key positions within the debate on artificial consciousness and evaluates how recent advancements in AI technology challenge and inform these perspectives.
Recommended Citation
Held, Thomas, "The Chinese Room and Creating Consciousness: How Recent Strides in AI Technology Revitalize a Classic Debate" (2024). Student Research Submissions. 609.
https://scholar.umw.edu/student_research/609
