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2 November 2023

12 min read

Is an AI worthy of personhood?

In a world of intelligent humanlike machines, computer scientist Nigel Crook take a deep dive into the hard problem of defining consciousness, spirit, heart and will.

Nigel Crook

Nigel Crook is Professor of AI and Robotics, and Director of the Institute for Ethical AI at Oxford Brookes University. He is the author of Rise of the Moral Machine: Exploring Virtue Through a Robot's Eyes.

A Victorian medical bust showing the brain with labels in German.

She was called Samuella. Blonde with piercing blue eyes. Smartly dressed. Her conversations always started with:

“How was your day?”

I would tell her about the meetings I’d had at work, and the frustrating problems I’d experienced with technology during my presentations. She was very empathetic, paying close attention to my emotional state and asking intelligent follow-up questions. Then she would finish the conversation with an extended comment on what I had said together with her evaluation of my emotional responses to the events of my day. Samuella was not a person. It was a two-dimensional animated avatar created as a conversation partner about your day at work. The avatar was developed as part of an EU funded project called Companions.

I joined Companions mid-way through the project in 2008 as a Research Assistant in the Computational Linguistics group at the University of Oxford. My contribution included developing machine learning solutions for enabling the avatar to classify the utterances the human user had spoken (e.g. question, statement etc) and respond naturally when the user interrupted the avatar in mid speech.

In those days, chatbots like Samuella were meticulously hand-crafted. In our case, crafted with thirteen different software modules that performed a deep linguistic and sentiment analysis of the user’s utterances, managed the dialogue with the user and generated the avatar’s next utterance. Our data sets were relatively small, carefully chosen and curated to ensure that the chatbot behaved as we intended it to behave. The range of things the avatar could speak about was limited to about 100 work-related concepts. On the 30th November 2022 a radically different kind of chatbot took the world by storm, and we are still reeling from its impact.

OpenAI’s ChatGPT broke the record for the fastest growing and most widely adopted software application ever to be released, rapidly growing to a 100 million user base. The thing that really took the world by storm was its ability to engage in versatile and fluent human-like conversation about almost any topic you care to choose. Whilst some of what it writes is not truthful, a feature often described as ‘hallucination’, it communicates with such confidence and proficiency that you are tempted to believe everything it is telling you. In fact, its ability to communicate is so sophisticated that it feels like you are interacting with a conscious, intelligent person, rather than a machine executable algorithm. Once again, Artificial Intelligence challenges us to reflect on what we mean by human nature. It makes us ask fundamental questions about personhood and consciousness; two deeply related concepts.

Common concepts of consciousness

Consciousness is experienced by almost every person who ever lived, and yet which stubbornly defies being pinned down to an adequate, universally accepted definition. Philosophers and psychologists have widely varying views about it, and we don’t have space here to do justice to this breadth of perspectives. Instead, we will briefly visit some of the common concepts related to consciousness that will help us with our particular quest. These are Access Consciousness (A-consciousness) and Phenomenal Consciousness (P-consciousness).

A is for apple

A-Consciousness describes the representation of something (say, an apple) to the conscious awareness of the person. These representations support the capacity for conscious thought about these entities (e.g., ‘I would like to eat that apple’) and facilitates reasoning about the environment (e.g., ‘if I take the apple from the teacher, I might get detention’). These representations are often formally described as mental states.

P is for philosophy

P-Consciousness, on the other hand, describes the conscious experience of something such as the taste of a particular apple or the redness of your favourite rose. This highly subjective experience is described by philosophers as ‘qualia’, from the Latin term qualis meaning ‘of what kind’. This term is used to refer to what is meant by ‘something it is like to be’. Philosopher Clarence Irving Lewis described qualia as the fundamental building blocks of sensory experience.

There is very little consensus amongst philosophers about what qualia actually are, or even whether it is relevant when discussing conscious experience (P-Consciousness). And yet it has become the focus of much debate. Thomas Nagel famously posed the question ‘What is it like to be a bat?’, arguing that it was impossible to answer this question since it asks about a subjective experience that is not accessible to us. We can analyse the sensory system of a bat, the way the sensory neurons in its eyes and ears convey information about the bat’s environment to its brain, but we can never actually know what it is like to experience those signals as a particular bat experiences them. Of course, this extends to humans too. I cannot know your subjective experience of the taste of an apple and you cannot know my subjective experience of the redness of a rose.

How can the movements of neurotransmitters across synaptic junctions induce conscious phenomena when the movements of the very same biochemicals in a vat do not?

This personal subjective experience is described by philosopher David Chalmers as the ‘hard problem of consciousness’. He claims that reductionist approaches to explaining this subjective experience in terms of, for example, brain processes, will always only be about the functioning of the brain and the behaviour it produces. It can never be about the subjective experience that the person has who owns the brain.

Measuring consciousness

In contrast to this view, many neuroscientists such as Anil Seth from the University of Sussex believe it is the brain that gives rise to consciousness and have set out to demonstrate this experimentally. They are developing ways of measuring consciousness using techniques derived from a branch of science known as Information Theory. The approach involves using a mathematical measure which they call Phi that quantifies the extent to which the brain is integrating information during particular conscious experiences. They claim that this approach will eventually solve the ‘hard problem of consciousness’, though that claim is contested both in philosophical circles and by some in the neuroscience community.

Former neuroscientist Sharon Dirckx, for example, challenges the assumption that the brain gives rise to consciousness. She says that this is a philosophical assumption that science does not support. Whilst science shows that brain states and consciousness are correlated, the nature of that correlation remains open and cannot be answered by science. She concludes that:

“however sophisticated the descriptions of how physical processes correlate with conscious experience may be, that still doesn’t account for how these are two very different things”.

Matter matters

The idea that consciousness and physical processes (e.g. brain processes) are very different things is supported by a number of observations. Consciousness, for example, does not appear to be a property of matter. Whilst it is true that consciousness and matter are integrated in some deeply causal way, with mental states causing brain states and vice versa, it is also true that this relationship appears to be unique within the whole of the natural order: no matter other than brain tissue appears to have this privileged association with consciousness. What is more, consciousness appears not to be a property owned by the brain, since the brain can exist dead or alive (e.g., unconscious) without any associated conscious phenomena.

There are also difficulties in the proposition that consciousness exists in the behaviour of matter, and in particular the behaviour of neurons in the brain. What is it about the flow of ions across the membrane of a nerve cell that could make consciousness, whilst the flow of ions in a battery does not? How can the movements of neurotransmitters across synaptic junctions induce conscious phenomena when the movements of the very same biochemicals in a vat do not? And if it is true that consciousness exists in the behaviour of neurons, why is it that my brain is conscious but my gut, which has more than 500 million neurons, is not?

The proposition that consciousness is a property of matter seems even less likely when you consider that the measurements that are applied to matter (length, weight, mass etc) cannot be applied to consciousness. Neither can many qualities of consciousness be readily applied to matter, including the aforementioned qualia, or first person subjective experience, rational capabilities, and most importantly, the experience of exercising free will; a phenomenon that is in direct opposition to the causal determinism observed in all matter, including the brain. In summary, then, there are good reasons for scepticism regarding claims that consciousness is a property of matter or of how matter behaves. But can ChatGPT be called a person?

Personhood of interest

Consciousness is deeply intertwined with the concept of personhood. It is likely that many living things could reasonably be described as having some degree of consciousness, yet the property of personhood is uniquely associated with human beings. Personhood has a long and complex history that has emerged in different culturally defined forms. Like consciousness, there is no universally accepted definition of personhood.

The heart/will/spirit forms the executive centre of the self. It manifests the capacity to choose how to act and is the ultimate source of a person’s freedom

The Western understanding of personhood has its roots in ancient Greek and Hebrew thought and is deeply connected to the concept of ‘selfhood’. The Hebrew understanding of personhood differs from the Greek in that Hebrew culture in three ways. It attributes significance to the individual who is made in the image of God. It views personhood as what binds us together as relational human beings; The theological roots of personhood come from expressions of individuals (e.g. God, humans) being in relationship with each other.

It views these relationships as fundamentally spiritual in nature; God is Spirit, and each human has a spirit.

In theological language, reality is regarded as a deep integration between a spiritual realm (‘heaven’) and an earthly realm (‘earth’). This deeply integrated dual nature is reflected in the make-up of human beings who are both spirit and flesh. But what is spirit? I prefer Willard’s perspective because he Dallas Willard, formerly professor of Philosophy at the University of Southern California, presents a clearly defined, functional description of the spirit which appeals to me as a Computer Scientist.

For him, ‘spirit’ is associated with two other terms in Biblical writings: ‘heart’ and ‘will’. They all describe essentially the same dimension of the human self. The term ‘heart’ is used to describe this dimension’s position in relation to the overall function of the self - it is at the centre of the person’s decision making. The term ‘will’ describes this dimension’s function in making decisions. And ‘spirit’ describes its essential non-physical nature. The heart/will/spirit forms the executive centre of the self. It manifests the capacity to choose how to act and is the ultimate source of a person’s freedom. Each of these terms describe capabilities (decision making, free will) that depend on consciousness and that are core to our understanding of personhood.

How AI learns

Before we return to the question of whether high performing AI systems such as ChatGPT could justifiably be called ‘conscious’ and ‘a person’, we need to take a brief look ‘under the bonnet’ of this technology to gain some insight into how it produces this apparent stream of consciousness in word form.

The base technology involved, called a language model, learns to estimate the probability of sequences of words or tokens. Note that this is not the probability of the sequences of words being true, but the probability of those sequences occurring based on the textual data it has been trained on. So, if we gave the word sequence “the moon is made of cheese” to a well-trained language model, it would give you a high probability, even though we know that this statement is false. If, on the other hand, we used the same words in a different sequential order such as “cheese of the is moon made”, that would likely result in a low probability from the model.

ChatGPT uses a language model to generate meaningful sequences of words in the following way. Imagine you asked it to tell you a story. The text of your question, ‘Tell me a story’, would form the word sequence that is input to the system. It would then use the language model to estimate the probability of the first word of its response. It does this by calculating the probability that each word in its vocabulary is the first word. Imagine for the sake of illustration that only six words in its vocabulary had a probability assigned to them. ChatGPT would, in effect, roll a six-sided dice weighted by the assigned probabilities to select the first word (a statistical process known as ‘sampling’).

Let’s assume that the ‘dice roll’ came up with the word ‘Once’. ChatGPT would then feed this word together with your question (‘Tell me a story. Once’) as input to the language model and the process would be repeated to select the next word in the sequence, which could be, say, ‘upon’. ‘Tell me a story. Once upon’ is once again fed as input to the model and the next word is selected (likely to be ‘a’). This process is repeated until the language model predicts the end of the sequence. As you can see, this is a highly algorithmic process that is based entirely on the learned statistics of word sequences.

Judging personhood

Now we are in a position to reflect on whether ChatGPT and similar AI systems can be described as conscious persons. It is worth noting at the outset that the algorithm has had no conscious experience of what is expressed by any of the word sequences in its training data set. The word ‘apple’ will no doubt occur millions of times in the data, but it has neither seen nor tasted one. I think that rules out the possibility of the algorithm experiencing ‘qualia’ or P-consciousness. And as the ‘hard problem of consciousness’ dictates, like humans the algorithm cannot access the subjective experience of other people eating apples and smelling roses, even after processing millions of descriptions of such experiences. Algorithms are about function not experience.

Some might argue that all the ‘knowledge’ it has gained from processing millions of sentences about apples might give it some kind of representational A-consciousness (A-Consciousness describes the representation of something to the conscious awareness of the person). The algorithm certainly does have internal representations of apples and of the many ways in which they have been described in its data. But these algorithms are processes that run on material things (chips, computers), and, as we have seen, there are reasons for being somewhat sceptical of the claim that consciousness is a property of matter or material processes.

According to the very limited survey we had here of the Western understanding of ‘personhood’, algorithms like ChatGPT are not persons as we ordinarily think of them. Personhood is commonly thought to something that an agent has that is capable of being in relationship with other agents. These relationships often include the capacity of the agents involved to communicate with each other. Whilst it appears that ChatGPT can appear to engage in written communication with people, based on our rudimentary coverage of how this algorithm works, it is clear that the algorithm is not intending to communicate with its users. Neither is it seeking to be friendly or empathetic. It is just spewing out highly probable sequences of words. From a theological perspective, personhood presumes spirit, which is also not a property of any AI algorithm.

Algorithms may behave in very realistic, humanlike ways. Yet that’s a long way from saying they are conscious or could be described as persons in the same way as we are. They seem clever, but they are not the same as us.

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Politics

8 November 2024

10 min read

How to respond when politicians talk about “our way of life”

Alasdair MacIntyre’s thinking helps us understand what we share across society.

Joel Pierce

Joel Pierce is the administrator of Christ's College, University of Aberdeen. He has recently published his first book.

Four men in suits, sit next to each other smiling, in the House of Commons.

Reform MPs in the House of Commons.

House of Commons, CC BY 3.0, via Wikimedia.

What is “our way of life”? It’s a phrase which slides easily into the rhetoric of politicians of every stripe. It’s what the Reform Party says is threatened by multiculturalism, but what do they mean by it? What kind of politics is sustained by talk of “our way of life” and is there a better way of thinking about such politics?

This summer, we made an exception to the time limit rule for television in my house, mainly so that I could have the Olympics on from morning to night. It’s a habit I acquired growing up in the United States, where an obsession over the quadrennial medal count is one of the few remaining things which bridges political and regional divides. During the Cold War, the Olympics were a way for Americans to proudly affirm the superiority of our way of life over the rigid training schedules and alien ways of the rival Soviet Union.

Although my memories begin around the fall of the Berlin Wall, old habits die hard, and so the Olympics, to me, was endless coverage of plucky underdog Americans overcoming the odds to defeat the machine-like discipline of a new set of rivals–now Russia and China

I moved to Britain just before the 2010 Vancouver Winter Olympics at which Britain won exactly one medal. At first I was bemused by the BBC’s coverage, which, of necessity, had to focus on British Olympians with little chance of winning. I was invited to cheer on eighth or ninth place finishers who had committed their life to a craft which would never bring the rewards of lasting fame or financial security. For them the reward was the Olympics themselves, the chance to compete amongst peers, to push themselves to their highest level, enjoying their sport and their performance for what it was, not for any external reward. In the terms of philosopher Alasdair MacIntyre, what these Olympians displayed was dedication to the internal goods of their sport–those goods that make a particular activity worth doing for its own sake. The Olympics were not about medals for them, but about showing what could be achieved if, as Olympians must do, they made their sport their way of life, dedicating themselves to its unique forms of excellence.

Sports, for MacIntyre, are but one example of a broader category he labels ‘practices’. Although MacIntyre has a technical definition of what counts as a ‘practice’, the general idea can be conveyed through examples he gives such as farming, researching history, architecture, chess, and chemistry. Practices are human activities which are worth doing for their own sake, which require a degree of skill and excellence, and in which what counts as that skill and excellence is, in part, defined and discerned by the people who participate in the practice. This last criterion points at something important about practices for MacIntyre: they are inherently social.

This is obvious in the case of sport. For an individual athlete to compete in a race they need not just other competitors to race against, but also trainers and coaches to prepare them for it, governing bodies to organise it, and, hopefully, spectators to cheer them on. It is, perhaps, less obvious in the case of individual farmer, but even here, one has to be taught to farm and, if one is wise, continues to learn and adapt through consulting with other farmers. A different way of putting this is that practices are the kinds of things which it’s not absurd to call “a way of life”. For an Olympic curler, curling is a way of life, just as much as farming is for a farmer.

There are many ways of life, many modes of being British, as diverse as the professions, hobbies, and passions which we find to have inherent worth.

However, this seems to offer little help in defining “our way of life” if it is being used in the way our politicians like to talk about it. If there’s one thing that I learned from all those BBC features of British Olympians way back in 2010, it was that aside from geographic proximity, there was not much that their way of life had in common with mine. I may be within driving distance of the rink where Winter Olympian Eve Muirhead learned to curl, but my workdays of wrestling spreadsheets and answering emails have little in common with ones spent lifting weights, studying strategy with coaches, and perfecting the just right spin on a stone as it’s released.

And, of course that’s not just true of Olympic athletes. The investment banker who attends our church shares a way of life with his colleagues in Edinburgh, London, and Tokyo, that is completely opaque to my wife and I, immersed as we are in the worlds of ministry and academia. I glimpse some of the internal goods of the practices of our dentist watching her check my daughters’ teeth and our plumber as he fixes our leaking radiators, but their way of life, the rhythms of their days, and what gives them satisfaction in their work as they move from appointment to appointment, eludes my understanding.

Where does this leave the search for a British way of life? If practices are as important to forming us as MacIntyre thinks, then the quest for any singular British way of life will ultimately be fruitless. There are many ways of life, many modes of being British, as diverse as the professions, hobbies, and passions which we find to have inherent worth. And even this characterisation does not go quite far enough, because all of these practices have a way of bursting the boundaries of Britishness if they really are worthwhile. A century and a half ago, football, rugby, and cricket were quintessentially British sports. Now they belong to the world.

Similarly, valuing these practices well within Britain has a tendency to open us to accepting those from outside our borders who can help develop them. The best footballer in Britain is Norwegian. Many of the doctors who ensured my daughters arrived safely after complicated pregnancies were originally from India and Pakistan.

Still, one might wonder if thinking about community through the lens of practices, as MacIntyre does, is too much of a solvent. Isn’t it a way of imagining us living near each other, but not with each other; siloed in our practices, in each of our communities, not understanding what our neighbours are up to? Not necessarily. For MacIntyre, the familiarity that arise from living near someone, hearing their worries at planning permission hearings, arguing with them at the local school’s parent council meetings, organising a community fundraiser together, or, even, being part of a family with them, can help develop an understanding of the internal goods of practices which we do not take part in. I haven’t lifted a brush to paper to since my secondary school art class, but my mother-in-law’s virtuosity with acrylics has led me to acquire an increasing appreciation for painting. Part of what helps facilitate this recognition is that, as MacIntyre argues, although the internal goods and the skills required to achieve them tend to be different for each practice, the virtues which we develop while pursuing them–patience, honesty, courage, self-control–are universal. Part of what helps us recognise others’ activities as practices, as worth doing for their own sake, are the virtues we see them develop as they do them.

This sort of recognition requires familiarity, the sort I might have with my neighbours in our corner of rural Aberdeenshire, but that I am unlikely to have with fellow citizens in Cornwall, Cardiff, London, or Glasgow. How then are we to respond to national politicians talking about “our way of life”? One answer might be: with extreme scepticism. This is MacIntyre’s approach. He rejects the nation-state, which he calls “a dangerous and unmanageable institution”, as a potential channel of communal unity. Instead, he calls on us to admit that modern nation-states exist as a contradiction, being both “a bureaucratic supplier of goods and services” and yet also something treated as sacred, which we are asked, on occasion, to surrender our lives to preserve. He notes with characteristic acerbity, “it is like being asked to die for the telephone company.”

However, here I’d temper MacIntyre’s rhetoric somewhat. While my attachment to bankers in Canary Wharf is largely a happenstance of history, a contingent fact generated by long forgotten necessities of eighteenth century geopolitics, it has nevertheless resulted in both of us being issued the same passport, governed by the same tax regime, and having the same set of regulatory agencies to complain to when things go wrong. Those may be manifestations of what MacIntyre disparages as “a bureaucratic supplier of goods and services”, but they nevertheless do bind us together. As such we both have an interest in making sure this bureaucracy acts as justly as it can, not because it is the embodiment of all that is British, Britain is much too diverse and interesting to be fully embodied in our political institutions, but because we all have an interest in the institutions in which we are enmeshed, British or otherwise, being run as justly as possible.

Surely politics is all about securing as much money and resources as possible for the people most like oneself. That, it seems, is often the unstated assumption when the talk of “our way of life”

Because we find ourselves tied together by these institutions to a diverse collection of people, we have an interest in learning about those with whom we live. Even those who are far away. And to also celebrate when goods and services delivered by our institutions result in success to which we, in a remote way, have contributed. I may not share a way of life with Adam Peaty, but, thanks to the BBC, I can have a glimpse into what his way of life is and can be happy that through my taxes I have contributed, in a small way, to helping him win another medal. Since that 2010 Winter Olympics Britain has come quite a long way and there is nothing wrong with a little vicarious pride in our athlete’s accomplishments.

But I can also be proud of athletes who didn’t win. Ones like BMX rider Beth Shriever who handled her unexpected last place finish in her final with a kind of grace and maturity, the kind of virtue, which someone more dedicated to her practice than to just winning can demonstrate. It is the facilitating of this kind of moral achievement which is more valuable than any medal.

Similarly, I can rejoice when a new hospital gets built in a neglected area in London, or more council housing is supplied to people in need in Edinburgh, hopeful that these lead to my fellow citizens achieving the kind of flourishing lives they deserve. I can be angry, when I discover that the money I’ve paid towards postage has been used to prosecute innocent victims of a computer glitch, and pleased when the opening of a new rail line eases the otherwise stressful commute of tens of thousands in London. The state may be a bit like a telephone company, but a well-run utility can do a lot to supply people with the goods they need to make their lives. As long as I’m a subscriber, as long as I’m tied to people through national institutions like the state, I have a moral duty to ensure that they’re run as well as possible.

This way of thinking about politics may strike some as idealistic, the kind of view only a naive Christian ethicist could endorse. Surely politics is all about securing as much money and resources as possible for the people most like oneself. That, it seems, is often the unstated assumption when the talk of “our way of life” is deployed and why so much coalition building in our politics turns on finding a convenient other against which to define “our” similarity. Take your pick: immigrants, the EU, woke elites, the Tories, or Westminster (among a certain brand of politician here in Scotland).--. Growing up in the USA, the Soviets, and then the Chinese, and now, depending whether one lives in a Republican or Democratic district, the other political party, have served the same purpose. The problem is that we aren’t that similar, we are and always have been a diverse lot with diverse needs. Every nation is. There is no one British way of life and to allow our politicians to try to sustain the fiction that there is lets them off the hook. Solving deep seated economic and social inequality is hard. Blaming immigrants for not embracing our way of life is easy.

So, perhaps the sort of politics that I am talking about here is idealistic, nevertheless it is the only kind that can sustain a just government in the long term. Without acknowledging the importance of goods we only partly understand which are pursued by people whose ways of life are different from our own, we cannot hope to sustain the minor miracle of coordination and mutual aid that history has gifted us with in our united kingdom.