Machine Consciousness as Pseudoscience: The Myth of Conscious Machines

TL;DR

This paper critically examines the scientific validity of the concept of conscious machines, arguing that it is a myth rooted in philosophical assumptions and science fiction rather than empirical science.

Contribution

It provides a rigorous critique of machine consciousness literature, highlighting its reliance on unprovable philosophical assumptions and the non-computability of phenomenal consciousness.

Findings

Phenomenal consciousness cannot be computed or objectively measured.

The hypothesis of conscious machines is unfalsifiable and based on subjective assumptions.

The idea of conscious machines is a myth influenced by transhumanism and science fiction.

Abstract

The hypothesis of conscious machines has been debated since the invention of the notion of artificial intelligence, powered by the assumption that the computational intelligence achieved by a system is the cause of the emergence of phenomenal consciousness in that system as an epiphenomenon or as a consequence of the behavioral or internal complexity of the system surpassing some threshold. As a consequence, a huge amount of literature exploring the possibility of machine consciousness and how to implement it on a computer has been published. Moreover, common folk psychology and transhumanism literature has fed this hypothesis with the popularity of science fiction literature, where intelligent robots are usually antropomorphized and hence given phenomenal consciousness. However, in this work, we argue how these literature lacks scientific rigour, being impossible to falsify the opposite hypothesis, and illustrate a list of arguments that show how every approach that the machine consciousness literature has published depends on philosophical assumptions that cannot be proven by the scientific method. Concretely, we also show how phenomenal consciousness is not computable, independently on the complexity of the algorithm or model, cannot be objectively measured nor quantitatively defined and it is basically a phenomenon that is subjective and internal to the observer. Given all those arguments we end the work arguing why the idea of conscious machines is nowadays a myth of transhumanism and science fiction culture.