| Title: | Consciousness and AI |
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| Course Section Number: | PHI-269-01 |
| Department: | Philosophy |
| Description: | What is the relationship between the three pounds of wet biomass in your skull and the fact that you understand the sentence that you are currently reading? This question, as with many good philosophical questions, is simple to state but very difficult to answer. On the one hand, you are a thinking being: you have thoughts, feelings, desires, wishes, and a rich inner mental life to which you alone have access. There is something that it is like to be you. On the other hand, you are a physical being: you are composed primarily of water and carbon, and constitute a complex system of biochemical reactions. You are the sort of thing that can be studied, and whose behavior can be explained, by biochemistry, neuroscience, and psychology. What are we to make of these two aspects of ourselves? In this course, we will survey the major theories in analytic philosophy of mind as frameworks for understanding the mind and its place in nature. We will then bring these frameworks to bear on one of the most pressing philosophical questions of our moment: could an artificial system be conscious, and if so, how would we know? This question is no longer merely hypothetical. Contemporary AI systems are trained on vast amounts of data and develop from that training in ways that even their creators cannot predict. Is it possible that such systems could develop functional analogs to conscious states; internal states that influence their behavior in ways that parallel human conscious experience? Whether such states could constitute genuine experience, or merely its simulacrum, is precisely the kind of question that the philosophy of mind is uniquely equipped to address. |
| Credits: | 1.00 |
| Start Date: | August 26, 2026 |
| End Date: | December 19, 2026 |
| Meeting Information: |
08/26/2026-12/18/2026 Lecture Monday, Wednesday, Friday 01:10PM - 02:00PM, Room to be Announced
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| Faculty: | Carlson, Matthew |
Course Status
| Section Name/Title | Status | Dept. | Capacity |
Enrolled/ Available/ Waitlist |
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