Sound Research WIKINDX
Sound Research WIKINDX |
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Saad, G. 2025, June 2–4, But AI has no “I”: A phenomenology of intelligence without self. Unpublished paper presented at Existential and Phenomenological Theory and Culture Conference 2025. Added by: alexb44 (06/08/2025, 10:54) Last edited by: alexb44 (06/08/2025, 13:22) |
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| Resource type: Conference Paper Language: en: English BibTeX citation key: Saad2025 Email resource to friend View all bibliographic details  |
Categories: General Keywords: Artificial Intelligence, Consciousness, Phenomenology, Philosophy, Self Creators: Saad Collection: Existential and Phenomenological Theory and Culture Conference 2025 |
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| Abstract |
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The rapid advance of artificially intelligent technologies has led to considerable speculation about their potential sentience, consciousness, and personhood. While the development of AI over the last 40 years has focused primarily on its application in limited, task-specific scenarios, such as robotics and video gaming, the recent proliferation of large language models, or LLMs, has recast AI in the role of a generalpurpose tool. It is believed that, if AI can successfully generate and understand human language, it should also be able to leverage its linguistic ability to learn about any topic of human interest. In this line of thought, an artificial “general” intelligence, or AGI, will eventually achieve what philosopher Nick Bostrom describes as a “superintelligence” which “greatly exceeds the cognitive performance of humans in virtually all domains of interest.” In this paper, I will present a phenomenological argument against this hypothetical scenario by applying the distinction between consciousness and self-consciousness in Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit. I contend that, while artificially intelligent technologies can mimic some of the operations of consciousness, their inevitable deficiencies, such as the incurable “hallucinations” of LLMs, can be understood as the result of their lack of self-consciousness. I will present this argument in two steps. First, I will give a very general overview of relevant sections of the Phenomenology of Spirit, emphasizing how Hegel demonstrates that consciousness is, in truth, self-consciousness. I will then consider the shortcomings of artificial intelligence in the context of this phenomenological account of what it means to be a thinking being. Consciousness, Self-Consciousness, and Spirit: Hegel on the experience of selfhood In the Phenomenology of Spirit, Hegel takes us on a journey in which he shows how even basic experiences, like sensory perception, are embedded within a richer tapestry of human history and culture. The work begins by describing consciousness in its most basic, denuded form. In “sense-certainty,” consciousness is the immediate experience of the “here” and “now.” Rather than actively shaping her own experience, the subject receives an external datum as a given truth. But while this perspective at first appears
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Seems to be unpublished.
Makes references as late as sept 2024. |
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p. 6
"We may say that the experience of being an artificial intelligence is one of being exposed to all the world like a perpetual newborn, capable of receiving, processing, and leveraging prodigious amounts of information but unable to take ownership of this information as its own."
Added by: Mark Grimshaw-Aagaard
(06/08/2025, 13:22)
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