WATERMARK

The Guardian recently published an article that asks Could AI be Conscious? It covers some of the debate I’ve been reading about for weeks now. The below paragraph tells a story I’ve seen referred to several times:

“Unfortunately, we do not have a great track record of recognising the inner lives of those whose status as conscious beings is unclear. Until the 1980s, doctors routinely performed surgery on newborns without anaesthesia, confident that infants could not feel pain. The babies could not report their experience, and the medical establishment found it convenient to assume there was nothing to report.”

But that story does not make sense. Babies can “report their experience” and they do. They do so loudly. Persuasively. The “medical establishment” apparently managed to ignore the screams. How? Were there no women in the room? No parents?

Human children and other animals can also report their experience. They always have, and we have sometimes been willing to witness it, and sometimes not. We now have laws that forbid treating them cruelly, laws that are often ignored with little consequence. Human women, too, often fall into the same situations, our experience denied by the religious, political, medical, and social “establishments”.

The consciousness question remains unresolved, even for humans. What is it? Where does it come from? Why is it? How might it be measured (or even determined)? Is it about thinking, feeling, both, or neither? Given so much uncertainty, how are we to resolve what/who counts as a conscious being? We have decided that humans count, even if it cannot be absolutely determined that any specific one is conscious. The others . . . 

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