Aporia

Perhaps there is a relationship between how interiority defines consciousness; how artificial intelligence has thus far failed to even approach consciousness and how it’s not even clear how it might; and how technologies that insist on the exteriorization of self reduce a sense of self. 

Thomas Metzinger, The Ego Tunnel: The Science of the Mind and the Myth of the Self, 2009 (quoted by the excellent Carvalhais):

“Being conscious means that a particular set of facts is available to you: that is, all those facts related to your living in a single world. Therefore, any machine exhibiting conscious experience needs an integrated and dynamical world-model.”

Josef Pieper, Leisure, The Basis of Culture, 1948:

“[W]hoever philosophizes takes a step beyond the work-a-day world and its daily routine. The meaning of taking such a step is determined less by where it starts from as by where it leads to… just where is the philosopher going when he transcends the wold of work? Clearly, he steps over a boundary: what kind of region lies on the other side of this boundary? … No matter how such questions could be answered in detail, in any case, both regions, the world of work and the “other realm,” where the philosophical act takes place in its transcending of the working world —both regions belong to the world of man, which clearly has a complex structure…

It is in the nature of a living thing to have a world: to exist and live in the world, in “its” world. To live means to be “in” a world. But is not a stone also “in” a world? Is not everything that exists “in” a world? If we keep to the lifeless stone, is it not with and beside other things in the world? Now, “with,” “beside,” and “in” are prepositions, words of relationship; but the stone does not really have a relationship with the world “in” which it lives. Relationship, in the true sense, joins the inside with the outside; relationship can only exist where there is an “inside,” a dynamic center, from which all operation has its source and to which all that is received, all that is experienced, is brought… [A world can be] considered as a whole field of relationships. Only a being that has an ability to enter into relationships, only a being with an “inside,” has a “world”; only such a being can exist in the midst of a field of relations.

Consciousness is, in part, a matter of there being an “inside” which is not part of the outside world, although it can relate to it. One reason it is difficult to imagine, even in principle, how artificial intelligence could achieve consciousness is the fact that there is no inscrutable interiority to a programmed machine: there is no “inside,” only commands from without in the language of an external world.

It is not clear, of course, how the interiority of human consciousness works, but whether it is some combination of deterministic and stochastic processes which produce an emergent, irreducible phenomenon or an even less-understood mechanism —for example David Deutsch’s ideas about the role quantum computation might play— it is made obvious by the depressing absence of progress in AI research that we have no notion how to reproduce it.

A more pressing question is: how do technologies which demand the exteriorization of what is “inside” affect consciousness? Is it the case that part of why it seems more difficult to achieve real connection —real relationship, in Pieper’s sense— is that we increasingly reside online, where our selves are shaped by systems which cannot support our interiority? There can be no “inside” on Facebook or Twitter (save, perhaps, for DMs and messages which, it should be noted, are where our most sincere and authentic interactions occur); there can be no monetization of interiority, nor even its capture; it is not a post type nor data we can share.

Artificial intelligence cannot achieve consciousness without interiority and a “world” of relations; we ourselves are creatures of consciousness living on systems incapable (both technologically and because of business incentives) of permitting interiority. Perhaps this accounts for our increasing artificiality.