consciousness

A popular narrative now casts all living entities as ‘machines’ built by genes, as Richard Dawkins called them. For Mayr, biology was unique among the sciences precisely because its objects of study possessed a program that encoded apparent purpose, design and agency into what they do. On this view, agency doesn’t actually manifest in the moment of... See more

This is particularly important because there are already indications that many people who often interact with chatbots attribute consciousness to these systems. At the same time, the consensus among experts is that current AI systems are not conscious.

people turn to AI with existential questions and complex, unresolved scientific problems because they think that the mystical processes in AI systems generate knowledge or insights that far exceed human cognitive abilities.