Transcript for Interview with Murray Shanahan on AI Consciousness

Read the Full Interview Transcript.

0. Introduction

How do we tell when AI is conscious? My guest, Imperial's Murray Shanahan, has spent his career investigating this question. And in this interview, we'll lay out a systematic proposal for how to validate machine consciousness.

Now, you might think that the question of whether AIs are conscious is a trivial theoretical fancy with no use in the real world. But this interview will show you why it's one of the most important questions with practical implications for not just how we treat AI systems, but also how we build and align them. But the most unexpected reward of investigating AI consciousness turns out to be what it reveals about our consciousness, about the nature of the human self.

Murray's most interesting claim is that LLMs have an important Buddhist lesson to teach all of us, namely, that there is no us. What we've learned to call the self is merely an illusion.

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1. Why AI Consciousness Matters

Johnathan Bi: One obvious reason people are interested in the question whether AI is conscious is the ethics question, right? If they are conscious, maybe we need to think twice about turning them off, about saying insulting things to them. What are some of the less obvious reasons why this question matters?

Murray Shanahan: Well, you said maybe we need to think twice about turning them off, but actually, maybe we need to think twice about turning them on. What's really at issue here is whether they can suffer. So I really think maybe we want to hesitate before we build something that's genuinely capable of suffering. I mean, there are many dimensions to that question, but the question of moral, it might not just be moral standing that matters, but even if we build something that perhaps appears to be conscious, but we ultimately decide it isn't really, to mistreat something which appears conscious is in itself does seem like a bad thing, in the same way as it would seem bad to torture a doll or something like that. And as you probably know, Kant had the view that animals couldn't experience suffering in the same way that we can, but nevertheless thought it was bad if humans subjected animals to torture or something like that, because it was bad for the humans themselves. And so maybe we'll be in that position with AI as well. I mean...

Johnathan Bi: So here's my answer for why it might be significant for us to answer this question, outside of the ethics question, which is that studying machine consciousness, whatever that means, might help us better understand the idiosyncrasies of our own.

Murray Shanahan: Of our own. Oh, for sure. Yeah.

2. Buddhism and AI

Johnathan Bi: So you wrote a lovely paper called “Satori Before Singularity,” in which you argued that human consciousness is constrained to a subject-object dualism, and that AI consciousness might not be. Why is that?

Murray Shanahan: Yes. So it's quite funny, that paper, which was published in 2012, Satori Before Singularity, people have been talking for a long time about super intelligence and the idea that we might be able to build AI that is in some sense superior intellectually to humans. And so I was thinking, is there another sense in which we could make or imagine something that was better than us? And so I was thinking about the Buddha actually, and thinking about the idea of people who are enlightened and people who perhaps have transcended dualistic thinking. And so I was thinking, well, perhaps there's another sense in which we could build something that's better than us in that respect, something that is less hampered by its own ego. And so it's a very speculative, slightly bonkers, crazy paper, but that's...

Johnathan Bi: Which is why I liked it and why I'm beginning with it. You're talking to a continental philosopher here.

Murray Shanahan: Right, right.

Johnathan Bi: Right. So let me give you a quote from that paper:

The pre-reflective, reflective, post-reflective series is not just one among many paths through the space of possible minds. Rather, the space of possible minds is structured in such a way that this is the only path through it.

(Murray Shanahan, “Satori Before Singularity”)

What are these three different stages that you laid out?