WORLDVIEW ETHICS — How Conscious Thinking & AI Differ: GÖDEL- COMPLETENESS

Philosophy of Consciousness: Dennett & Chalmers

Daniel Dennett and David Chalmers are famous philosophers of mind who are well-known for asking hard questions. In particular, the hard problem of consciousness, as Chalmers put it, is that we don’t know what causes qualia, or experienced subjective feelings. This problem comes out of understanding to some extent what consciousness is, but not understanding all the way. In this Spark, we’ll glance at the widely-accepted view, refine it with work by Antonio Damasio, and finally get around to exploring the importance of the work of Kurt Gödel in pursuit of our ultimate prize: a novel differentiator capable of providing clear demarcation between conscious thinking intelligences that can self-justify and self-motivate on the one hand, and non-conscious repositories of stored prior knowledge that are strangely developing something like agency in contemporary computer systems, on the other.

We have a process we can experience called consciousness that goes on in our biology, but, as Chalmers likes to ask, how does it develop feelings? Dennett likes to say that the stuff Chalmers labeled “easy” was in fact easy, but that the hard part isn’t that we don’t know where qualia come from, it’s more that we don’t know how the…