Consciousness Connects….
In their last two sessions, members of the Lower Sixth Symposium have been considering different aspects or implications of our study of consciousness. In the first meeting the students began by examining the famous legal case from 1932, Donoghue v Stevenson – Wikipedia.
The aim of the exercise was to examine the idea of blame as a segue into considering the potential criminal accountability of an AI system, perhaps a driverless car or a chatbot influencing behaviour?
This tied in with an earlier session about consciousness and AI, focussing on the Turing Test.
Our next session examined the idea of the evolution of consciousness. There was a lively discussion about what this might mean and, equally importantly, why this might matter. The discussion moved into the area of ensoulment and related issues connected to medical ethics. Unfortunately, there was not time in the session to listen to an excellent lecture on this by the biologist Nick Humphrey based on his 2022 book — Sentience: The Invention of Consciousness – Google Search.
Our study of consciousness continues and continues to give, in terms of the enormous array of fascinating avenues it has led us down and the many academic disciplines it has touched on.
