Friday, 27th September, 2024, 8:00pm to 10:00pm St. John’s Church, Bridgetown
(Both live and streamed)
John Thornton on – What on Earth has
Artificial Intelligence to do with Consciousness?
In this
talk we inquire into what it means to be a machine and what it means to be
conscious. This first involves seeing how the past of our scientific,
technological culture is coming to meet us from out of the future. It was in
the time of Galileo that we first set out to systematically understand the
universe mathematically and to use this understanding to build the
technological civilization that now engulfs the earth. Today, it is our
computer technology that embodies this mathematical understanding, an
understanding that originally set out to model the physical universe, but now
is intent on mathematically modelling and predicting our human behaviours and
speech. With the development of large language models like ChatGPT, we face the
real possibility of being unable to distinguish ourselves from our own
mechanical creations. And so we must ask, along with Alan Turing, if we cannot
make that distinction, on what basis can we claim that we ourselves are not
machines? Answering this question will involve looking into our immediate
experience of being conscious to see if we can directly discern our own
mechanicalness and what it means to transcend that mechanicalness.
John
Thornton is an Adjunct Associate Professor in Artificial Intelligence at
Griffith University in Australia. During his career in AI he has published more
than 70 peer-reviewed papers and received a best paper award at the
International Joint Conference on AI in 2007. Since moving to the UK in 2015 he
was instrumental in founding the philosophy group at the Free University
Brighton where he taught courses on philosophy of mind and phenomenology. He
has published two books, The Foundations of Computing (2007)
and The Questioning of Intelligence (2021). Currently, he
serves on the organising committee of the Totnes Consciousness Cafe and is
involved in setting up the Totnes Association for the Exploration of
Consciousness.
Cost: £5
Booking via Eventbrite HERE
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