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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