Member-only story
Is ChatGPT Conscious? Part 1 — Some History and the Chinese Room
Every time I read about the history of technology and the philosophy around it, I am amazed by how far back it goes. For some reason I am used to thinking that nobody really cared about sophisticated machine-related ideas, let alone AI before the 1980s, which, of course, is complete bollocks. I had the same surprise when I started reading about the history of ideas surrounding a question that has been made relevant again by ChatGPT — can machines genuinely think, in the way we think, and do they have internal experiences?
It turns out that people have been thinking about this problem for a long time. One of the oldest arguments we have on record was made by Leibniz back in 1714. What he imagined was the human brain enlarged to the size of a mill. A person could walk inside the mill and they would see all the moving parts of the machine interacting with each other, the same way that different parts of that brain interact with each other when we “think”. However, nowhere in this complicated machinery will one find anything that generates consciousness. Pretty bold statement, given that we have no idea what generates consciousness in any system, not just a mill, but also a brain. more than 200 years later we still haven’t found anything in the brain that we can point to and say “There! This is what creates our inner experiences, and if…
