Two perspectives on consciousness

From AI chatbots to Paradise Lost, two scholars explore what consciousness is and how we came to think about it.

Jason Bridges is an associate professor in Philosophy.

One of the peculiarities of being a philosopher is that your work rarely speaks to the issues of the day. The likelihood of practical bearing would seem especially small in the case of the philosophy of mind, an austere discipline that seeks to get clear on the unchanging logic of our most fundamental concepts of thought and experience. And yet, remarkably, we are now in the midst of an immensely important cultural development for which we can, and should, look to the philosophy of mind for guidance. This is the rise of conversational AI—those large language model–powered chatbots currently used by one billion people and counting.

Everyone who uses a chatbot faces a question. Or perhaps several related questions. Does a chatbot think? Does it know things? Is it conscious? We can try to shrug these questions off as speculative or unimportant. But the effort will be quixotic. Because interacting with a chatbot takes the form of a seeming communicative exchange, and because we all know that genuine communication is between beings who are aware of themselves as communicating, the question of the mindedness of the chatbot is internal to its use and unavoidable. When we type our queries and comments into the chatbot interface and await its responses—its seeming arguments, suggestions, praise, even expressions of delight or disappointment—are we participating in a sham? Or is there something talking back to us?

The question that here arises is a philosophical one. This is shown in the fact that it is a question that is in part about itself, about its own meaning. When we ask, “Is a chatbot a thinking, conscious being?,” it is not that we have straightforward criteria for applying the concepts of thinking and consciousness and just need to determine whether a chatbot meets them. Our situation is harder: We are not clear what exactly we are asking. When this is the predicament, it is not solved by seeking out more facts about the world around us. A different kind of insight is in order.

Wittgenstein wrote, “A philosophical problem has the form: ‘I don’t know my way about.’” The terrain in which Wittgenstein thinks we lose our bearings is that of our own language—of our words and what we use them to express. Our puzzlement is, at bottom, a failure to understand ourselves. The philosophical project, the project of constructing a map by which we may find our way through the tangle of our own thought and language, is a project of self-understanding.

When we engage in this inquiry, we will discover, I believe, that it is a serious mistake to regard a chatbot as thinking or conscious. Since more than half of users seem inclined to ascribe consciousness to chatbots, this is a mistake we evidently find it easy to commit. Why? One explanation is that the technology is designed precisely to get us to commit this mistake. The question then arises: What are we to do about such a thing in our midst?—by Jason Bridges

Timothy Harrison is an associate professor in English Language and Literature.

Consciousness is perhaps the central concept for how we understand our mindedness today in the West and increasingly around the world. This concept has a history. While I was writing Coming To: Consciousness and Natality in Early Modern England (University of Chicago Press, 2020), my first book, I became invested in the literary implications of the fact that the concept of consciousness had a relatively recent history we could trace back to the seventeenth century. I could correlate the history of the concept of consciousness with the history of the literary representation of mindedness to see if these two things intersected and, if so, how.

Conscientia, the immediate Latin ancestor of the English consciousness, has had, for most of its history, an evaluative meaning. It’s about questions of virtue and vice, doing things well or badly. But in the seventeenth century, it starts to mean something else, something like “the appearance of all of the somethings that show up for someone.” The famous example would be Descartes’s definition of thinking: A thought is something of which I am conscious. Here consciousness binds together different modalities of thinking, such as intellecting, sensing, imagining, remembering.

In early modern English, there is a semantic split: Conscience gradually becomes associated only with the evaluative meaning, and consciousness becomes associated with the nonevaluative meaning, with whatever shows up for me. The concept of consciousness that we’ve inherited in philosophy of mind and the neurosciences comes from this moment. But the biggest debates about consciousness in the seventeenth century were not about the human mind at all. They were about the Trinity. That’s pretty far from synapses and neurons.

I think poets and artists of various kinds contribute actively to the generation of concepts. The core literary text in my dissertation and my first book is John Milton’s Paradise Lost, in which Milton provides first-person narratives of what it’s like for Adam and Eve to wake up. He’s the first person to give Eve such a narrative, and he’s the first to give Adam such a narrative that is strikingly human, not superhuman or ecstatically mystic. Milton is imagining what it’s like to be a human being without nurture, without being in any way determined by family history, language, culture. In crafting first-person accounts of these scenes of originary awakening, Milton is doing a kind of imaginative work in relation to this new conceptual space of consciousness.

What is it to be a human being? What is it to be free? What is it to experience, or to be conscious? These questions are clarified not just by people writing propositional prose but also by people who are experimenting with literary language, visual art, film, or whatever. I think a more accurate version of intellectual history needs to involve all aspects of the human endeavor.—as told to Lucas McGranahan