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Project

The Relevance of Phenomenological Reflections on Consciousness for the Development of ‘Strong’ Artificial Intelligence

The Ph.D. dissertation will build on research undertaken in my Master of Arts thesis (which was entitled 'A Phenomenological Investigation of Artificial Intelligence'). The Ph.D. will be differentiated from the Masters, building on its initial chapters, but expanding the initial study. The Master’s thesis took as its focus the question of what consciousness is – taking primarily into consideration Edmund Husserl’s notion of consciousness as intentionality on the one hand, and Daniel Dennett and David Chalmers (via Thomas Nagel) on the other. The two fundamental issues up for discussion in the Ph.D. dissertation (outlined below) have their genesis in the M.A. In this dissertation we seek to examine exactly what is entailed by human consciousness and evaluate whether its traits could ever be theoretically reproduced in ‘thinking machines’. The research of the M.A. dissertation allowed me to gain a deeper insight into both the phenomenological and analytic approaches to consciousness and reached the conclusion that perhaps artificial consciousness (discussed below) was not beyond the realm of machines. It is envisioned, then, that the Ph.D. thesis shall take up this line of inquiry in earnest, and to determine more cogently as to whether or not human ‘consciousness’ (in the broadest sense), could ever be synthesised. Therefore, this Ph.D.-level research shall focus, firstly, on the development of the notion of consciousness in the phenomenological tradition. The idea of consciousness from within this discipline shall be examined in order to investigate whether this conception of consciousness is ever potentially achievable for the artificially intelligent. An important distinction shall be examined with regard to artificial intelligence and consciousness; an artificially intelligent machine is currently not held to be a conscious being. To that end, there are two questions which categorise the main themes of this PhD thesis: 1. What does a phenomenological conception of 'human' consciousness look like and why should it be taken as foundational? 2. Could ‘human’ consciousness, as we know it, ever be instituted in machines? (Apologies for any mistakes in the Dutch summary, I used the translator DeepL.com as, regrettably, my standard of Dutch is not good enough.)

Date:4 Sep 2020 →  23 Nov 2023
Keywords:Phenomenology, Edmund Husserl, Consciousness, Artificial Intelligence
Disciplines:Phenomenology
Project type:PhD project