Source: Block, N. (1995). On a confusion about a function of consciousness. Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 18(2), 227-247. https://doi.org/10.1017/s0140525x00038188
My students' Ethics and AI course reading this week. Now that we're nearing the end of the course, which started with two weeks of philosophy of AI, some ontology and philosophy of psychology and mind, and then moved through normative ethics to applied ethics: we're moving on to material which problematises the ideas of potential moral agency and potential moral patiency of AI, and makes more recondite the apportioning of blame and responsibility in situations where humans are producing, deploying, and managing AI.
One of the main problems is the status of AI in relation to consciousness. My scholars and I turn this week to Ned Block, who provided some important criterial distinctions and conceptual analytic desiderata for approaching consciousness, which has always presented a conceptual quagmire for philosophers and folk alike.
Block is one of the grand young men of 1980-90s analytic philosophy, and is still grand and going strong as a cognitive scientists and philosopher. Like Putnam, Quine, and Nagel, he's a creative and systematic philosophical thinker, and a superb neuropsychologist and cognitive scientist. (And he writes far more clearly than Quine. 'Word and Object' is terribly written.) His work is characterised by the bridging of fine-grained conceptual analysis with empirical findings from neuroscience, psychophysics, and cognitive psychology.
Block made a foundational philosophical and cognitive scientific intervention by diagnosing "consciousness" as a mongrel concept. He separated phenomenal consciousness (P-consciousness)—what it is like subjectively to experience something (qualia, experiential character)—from access consciousness (A-consciousness), which refers to representations made globally available to cognitive processing, working memory, reasoning, and report.
If you face my students when they're out in the wild doing philosophy and ethics of AI, you had better be across these concepts and Block's distinction between access consciousness and p-consciousness. Otherwise they will not be able to take you seriously.
