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Artificial Consciousness and Artificial Ethics: Between Realism and Social Relationism
Published in Wendell Wallach, Peter Asaro, Machine Ethics and Robot Ethics, 2020
Freed from the necessity to rely on internalist and individuocentric conceptions of consciousness, one is able to see how philosophical worries to do with solipsism, absent qualia, the explanatory gap between the neural and the phenomenal, and so on, are all systematic products of a dependence by many sectors of the philosophical and scientific community (a dependence which both feeds from and into unreflective idioms of folk talk about mind) upon an outmoded and unhelpful way of conceptualising experience or phenomenality. Many other authors have articulated versions of this richer, more deeply embodied, conception of phenomenality. A notable critique of the mind-body problem by Hanna and Thompson differentiates between two conceptions of body—the body of the physical organism which is the subject of biological investigation as a physical-causal system (Körper) and the ‘lived body’ (Leib), which is the individual subject of embodied experience of an organism as it makes sense of its trajectory in its world (Hanna and Thompson 2003). Hanna and Thompson deploy the Leib-Körper distinction to dissolve doubts over mind–body separation, other minds, and so on, by bifurcating notions of body, in contrast to the distinction between notions of phenomenality in Torrance, 2007.22 Other philosophical challenges to the other minds problem will be found in Gallagher’s rejection of theory–theory and simulation–theory approaches to mentalization, which draw upon work by Husserl, Scheler, Gurwitsch, Trevarthen and others who argue that, for example, the perception of someone’s sadness is not an inference to a hidden X behind the expressive countenance, but is rather a direct observation of the other’s experiential state, derived from the condition of primary intersubjectivity with their conspecific carers that humans and other primates are born into, and the secondary intersubjectivity of joint attention and engagement in joint projects in the world that occurs during later development (Gallagher 2005a, b; Zahavi 2001; Gallagher and Zahavi 2008; Thompson 2007). Such work by Gallagher and others offers a strong alternative to opposed viewpoints in debates over the psychology of social cognition, but a fortiori, marginalise classical other minds doubts as a philosophical side show.
Framing the Mind–Body Problem in Contemporary Neuroscientific and Sunni Islamic Theological Discourse
Published in The New Bioethics, 2018
Faisal Qazi, Don Fette, Syed S. Jafri, Aasim I. Padela
In modern neuroscience, despite the ability to localize experiences using functional MRI and other advanced imaging techniques, Joseph Levine’s (1983) so-called ‘explanatory gap’ argument has continued to undermine experimental findings. Levine’s argument aims to demonstrate our inability to explain away conscious experiences such as pain by relying solely on descriptions of the physical processes that occur in the brain at the time of those experiences. In other words, Levine is clarifying that physicalist theories will inevitably face difficulty insofar as purely physiologic knowledge does not lend insight into the subjective experience correlated with. He famously stated in 1983 that ‘pain is the firing of C fibers’ referring to the gap between identifying the neurophysiology as an objective entity and the actual reality of experiencing, in the subjective sense, that very thing. This insolubility of the explanatory gap requires more thought in any reframing of the mind–body-soul problem. As limitations of a purely scientific interrogation of consciousness are felt in the broader discourse, theorists would do well to broaden the epistemes under which they presently operate. The persistence of an explanatory gap is indication enough that physicalism is less tenable a view, and that in substance dualism, as an example, an explanatory gap does not even exist for the presence of a non-physical substance (soul) renders the whole issue more congruent.