Uppsala Vienna AI Colloquium

Does consciousness require biology or can systems made out of other materials be conscious? I develop an argument for the view that it is (nomologically) possible that some non-biological creatures are conscious, including conventional, silicon-based AI systems. It assumes the iterative natural kind (INK) strategy, according to which one should investigate consciousness by treating it as a natural kind which iteratively explains observable patterns and correlations between potentially consciousness-relevant features. The argument is based on the insight that we can already anticipate that future developments would give us reasons to attribute consciousness to some non-biological creatures. According to the argument, an idealized scientific investigation – based on the INK strategy – would deliver the result that some possible non-biological creatures are conscious, and the outcome of such an ideal application corresponds to what is actually the case. My argument for the former premise is based on the claim that theoretical virtues and pre-theoretical principles support attributing consciousness to psychological duplicates, i.e., non-biological, silicon-based creatures which share the coarse-grained functional organization of humans.