Simulacra as Conscious Exotica
Authors: Murray Shanahan
Abstract: The advent of conversational agents with increasingly human-like behaviour throws old philosophical questions into new light. Does it, or could it, ever make sense to speak of AI agents built out of generative language models in terms of consciousness, given that they are "mere" simulacra of human behaviour, and that what they do can be seen as "merely" role play? Drawing on the later writings of Wittgenstein, this paper attempts to tackle this question while avoiding the pitfalls of dualistic thinking.
Explore the paper tree
Click on the tree nodes to be redirected to a given paper and access their summaries and virtual assistant
Look for similar papers (in beta version)
We compare the title and abstract with papers indexed in our database. For arXiv papers, we search within the same category; for DOI and other sources, we search across sources and subjects. You can rerun the search as our database grows.