Well Action Psychotherapy

“All we need is a mathematical definition of consciousness, and then we can implement it as a computer program.”

Back in the 1980s I found myself at the UK Conference for Default Logic, and this was the last word in the discussion workshop on the theme of consciousness, delivered by one of the leading lights of logic research at the time, Robert Kowalski.

This – by the way – was the moment I realised that my research was becoming over-specialised, as there were only 12 delegates at the conference … but that’s another story.

There is so much science fiction written on the topic of AI becoming conscious, and what the consequences of that might be … but what would it mean for a computer to become conscious? I sometimes think we need to know what consciousness *is* before we should be worried about it, and that is something that nobody can agree on.

Freud clearly thought that consciousness exists in contradistinction to an unconscious, and he wrote at length about the importance of Words – that what distinguishes conscious thoughts from unconscious ones is the link between a thought and its verbal representation. Although Freud acknowledged that visual thinking can be important, he saw it as more primitive than verbal reasoning, and hence less effective.

Freud also asserted that consciousness is the thing that is lost when we sleep.

John Searle, an AI researcher in the 70s and 80s, attempted a more rigorous definition of consciousness in his influential paper “Minds, Brains and Programs” published in 1980. He managed to define consciousness in terms of rationality, but when he set about defining “rationality” the best he could manage was a circular definition in terms of consciousness.

Others see consciousness differently again:

Arnold Mindell doesn’t see consciousness as something lost during sleep, but rather sees the dreaming state as a different kind of consciousness.

Ken Wilber writes about consciousness as being a “spectrum”, something that is evolving through the colours of the rainbow independently of our own biological evolution.

Medics see consciousness as the thing that is lost in concussion and through anaesthesia; stoners see consciousness as the thing that is enhanced by THC, and widened with hallucinogens. Is this the same consciousness that mystics claim is broadened by meditation?

Neurologists are more likely to view consciousness as the ability to manage our changing focus between psychic processes, for others it’s just an “emergent property” of a neural network – an illusory experience that has no underlying meaning.

Many religious people associate consciousness with “the soul”, the part of us that endures after we die. The psychotherapist Roberto Assagioli had similar ideas, equating consciousness with “a pinpoint of awareness”, standing apart from all the processes of the psyche, yet in touch with, and inspired by “The Great Spirit”.

Many pioneers of quantum physics wrote about the idea that consciousness is a fundamental property of matter, or the universe, including Albert Einstein, Erwin Schrodinger (of cat fame), and Wolfgang Pauli, a view also espoused by Jacob Moreno, the founder of psychodrama. For many, including Einstein, Jung, Moreno and Assagioli, consciousness is a positive and creative force. For others including Freud, Arthur C Clarke and Searle, consciousness is just a powerful problem-solving attribute, as likely to be turned to the “problem” of torturing and killing humans as to the problem of alleviating poverty.

My own view is that the “threat” of AI consciousness, as dramatically portrayed by the “Terminator” films, is just a distraction. In our “post-enlightenment” world of nuclear weapons, genocide and mass-production of autonomous military drones, we don't need "Conscious AI" to have something to be frightened about - the biological consciousness of politicians bent on control with all the tools of economics and technology at their disposal is far more terrifying to me.