AI, Animals, and the Extended Mind
What Is Consciousness?
What each theory implies for AI consciousness, animal consciousness, and extended cognition. Mary's Room revisited.
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Learning Material
4 pagesLesson 6 — AI, Animals, and Mary's Room Revisited
Understanding the Complex: What Is Consciousness?
The theories we covered in Lesson 5 weren't built primarily with AI or animals in mind. They were built to explain human consciousness. But the most consequential questions about consciousness right now involve systems that aren't human: language models, octopuses, fish, bees, and the patients in vegetative states we met in Lesson 2.
How you answer those questions depends almost entirely on which theory you accept.
And at the end: Mary's Room. Is it resolved? Dissolved? Or stubbornly open?