In this post, we cover the following topics. Check out 1-4 if you want the high level view, and read or listen to #5 if you want the deep dive.
What is The Mind-Body Problem?
Who writes about it + what do they say?
How does this relate to AI?
Click for More.
Summary 🎧
1. What is The Mind-Body Problem?
The Mind-Body problem is as old as philosophy itself. Simply put, it’s the problem of consciousness—what is it like to be me, to be you, to be a beetle or a cat?
In studying this problem we ask, what is the mind? What is the brain? And what do I mean when I say “I”?
2. Who writes about it?
Heraclitus: “No man ever steps in the same river twice, for it's not the same river and he's not the same man.”
Here we are introduced to the nature of flux or impermanence. Heraclitus posits that we change as much as the river. And if that’s the case, what is “I” when “I” am always changing?
Plutarch and the Ship of Theseus.
We don’t have space for a deep dive here, but click the link below to read about it in an earlier post.
Decartes creates a stream of study known as psychic dualism in which he posits that the mind and body are inherently separate. The “I” remains constant through flux though the body might change.
Modern empirical science confirms that most (but not all) of our cells are being regularly shed, broken down, and replenished. Our bodies are not unlike the ship fo Theseus.
All of this leads to 3 distinct possibilites:
Everything is conscious (panpsychism)
Nothing is conscious (materialism)
The “mind” is separate from the body, yet inherently connected to it (dualism).
3. How does this relate to AI?
If you remember, when I asked ChatGPT what it meant when it referred to itself as “I” it had a clear answer.
This answer would be akin to the materialist view—that it was a collection of servers and a centralized protocol to recall information in a natural way optimized for human comprehension.
Ultimately, until we can prove that materialism isn’t the reality of human consciousness, we must grapple with the possibility that we function like a highly sophisticated and discrete version fo what we see in modern artificial intelligence systems like ChatGPT.
4. Click for More:
Great podcast by panpsychic philosopher Philip Goff who covers all 3 possibilities
NYT Article about robotics, the main question the author asks is if the mind is in fact the body
Article discussing consciousness from the perspective of a linguist, by Noam Chomsky in the New York Times (I have a few free gift articles to share, reach out if you want one!)
5. Summary 🎧
The mind-body problem is part riddle and part science. Ironically, it’s the kind of problem that sophisticated AI platforms can help us solve.
Most modern day problems exists because they are either outside of our will or outside of our ability.
I believe that the mind-body problem is outside both of these domains.
We don’t want to solve this problem because for many of us, it’s not a problem at all. To question one’s own relationship to consciousness is tantamount to questioning our very relationship to reality.
And for those of us that do want to solve it, it’s largely beyond our current grasp of neuroscience.
Thus, this problem is most often relegated to the world of theory and thought experiment.
But to harken to our last post, I think we are living in a moment in which science desperately needs philosophy.
Philosophy teaches us not to take our intuitions of consciousness for granted and instead to submit them to reflection and evidence-based observation. More than that, Philosophy even leaves us with three viable options which science must grapple with (Panpsycism, Dualism, and Materialism).
Could we be just like ChatGPT? Is our consciousness simply an organized and highly sophisticated protocol? A high-caliber element of evolution that organizes our collection of stored memories and qualia (that is, the memory we have about what certain experiences felt like). Is our brain “hallucinating” the “I” because it’s evolutionarily advantageous?
If you feel the urge to reject this line of thinking, consider a person who has experienced a Traumatic Brain Injury, is experiencing Dementia, or has lost consciousness in a comatose state. In each of those situations, the effect on the material structure of the brain or nervous system altered or even eliminated the “I.”
If some version of materialism is in fact true, then that begs the question: how much more sophisticated are “we” than artificial intelligence? If we localized ChatGPT into discrete bodies of some kind, could we even tell the difference?