Conscious Non-living Beings and Moral Dilemma
Revisiting fundamental questions about life and consciousness
I have a question for you. Which would cause you a greater feeling of guilt: killing a mosquito, or mercilessly demolishing an android with a human-like mind?
Unless you’re a buddhist monk, you likely wouldn’t hesitate to kill a mosquito that has been feasting on your precious blood and ruining your good night’s sleep, without a hint of remorse. But what would you do if you were told to smash an android - one you’ve been chatting with - to pieces? You’d likely hesitate if you are not a psychopath.
However, consider this: a mosquito is a living creature, even though generally not considered conscious, while an android is merely a machine, albeit one that is hypothetically conscious.
What then is life? And what is consciousness after all?
Principles of life
According to Britannica, life is living matter that shows certain attributes including responsiveness, growth, metabolism, energy transformation, and reproduction.
Well … yes. But let’s deepen (and widen) our understanding of life beyond this boring textbook definition. The following video features a mini lecture by Dr. Paul Nurse, a British biochemist and 2001 Nobel Prize laureate.
Starting with the remark, “There isn't really a very good definition of life,” Dr. Nurse explains his take on life using five core principles: the cell, the gene, evolution by natural selection, chemistry, and information. The following is his summary.
Living things are bounded physical entities. The bounded entity is the chemical and informational machine. And then critically, that informational chemical machine in the bounded entity has a hereditary system that determines how it works. A system which has variability and therefore the whole thing can evolve by natural selection.
And that means that the living thing can acquire purpose: purpose to be better adapted in the life state it finds itself, and so we can evolve living things from one type into another.
Still not easy to grasp, my understanding of his view is that a living thing is a physical entity equipped with a hereditary chemical system. Furthermore, there should be variability between entities, providing room for evolution by natural selection. Makes sense?
One thing now becomes apparent: by any definition, consciousness is not necessarily a critical element of life.
Consciousness: scientific and philosophical views
It’s even harder to define consciousness. Probably the most general (and vague) definition of consciousness could be ‘the state of being aware of and able to think and perceive one's surroundings’. It’s about the relationship between the mind and the world with which it interacts.
While there are tons of different views, theories, and hypotheses on consciousness — enough to take years to go through — let me present two noteworthy resources. One offers a blend of scientific and philosohical perspectives, while the other provides a unique viewpoint from a renowned historian and philosopher.
This video by The Economist offers various interesting approaches to understand consciousness. While I don’t want to oversimplify its content, (So I strongly recommend you watch it for yourself!) a key takeaway in terms of neuroscience is the role of the cerebral cortex. Playing a crucial part in higher brain functions like memory, perception, and language, the cerebral cortex is intimately involved in consciousness. This explains why many animals other than mammals and some birds — such as invertebrates like insects, arachnids, mollusks, and crustaceans which have no cerebral cortex — are considered to lack consciousness.
And now, here are intriguing philosophical perspectives from Yuval N. Harari. Like a philosopher featured in the above video, Harari focuses on the ‘subjectivity’ aspect of consciousness.
The most fascinating part of his take on consciousness is the following quote.
What makes consciousness so unique and so important is that it is the least neutral phenomenon in the universe. It is the only thing in the universe as far as we can tell that involves suffering and in many ways suffering is the very opposite of pure observation. Observation tries to capture the present reality as objectively as possible and the core of any experience of suffering is a rejection of present reality and a preference of something else, something that doesn’t exist at present. You feel something but you want to feel something else …… Suffering is not the pain itself. Pain is just a sensation. suffering is the mental reaction to that sensation.
While generally agreeing to his views, I diverge on his assertion: “Both Scholars and non-academics come to such debates with a wrong assumption then tend to confuse intelligence with consciousness and assume that artificial intelligence will inevitably develop consciousness …… In mammals, the evolution of intelligence involved the evolution of consciousness too. But computers may be developing along a very different path just as airplanes fly faster than birds without ever developing feathers.”
No, Professor Harari, I respectfully disagree. Even though I’m a non-academic as you put it, we must all — including you and I — acknowledge that we cannot project the future merely based on the past. Moreover, I believe your airplane / bird analogy makes a wrong assumption about AI. Unlike hardware development such as airplanes, AI is being developed based on neural networks, imitating the neurons of the human brain.
Moral dilemmas involving conscious non-living beings
Some might argue that debates about AI consciousness are like trying to run before learning to walk, especially when we humans haven’t even solved issues involving animal welfare, abortion rights / fetal rights, etc. But on the contrary, I believe that hypothetical musings about which being should be valued more — a life form with no consciousness versus a non-living being with consciousness —could help us delve deeper into these existing issues.
Moreover, this argument introduces even more intriguing perspectives. When consciousness is the capacity to suffer — distinguished from pain, which is merely a sensation, as argued by Yuval Harari — could we assume that a psychopathic criminal, devoid of empathy and thus arguably incapable of suffering, lacks consciousness? Why should we apply human rights to such a criminal then?
The dramatic development of AI is leading us humans to question and revisit fundamental matters regarding our own identity and existence. This may pose an even more serious issue than job replacement by AI.