Consciousness and AI John C. Havens is a contributing writer for Mashable, The Guardian, and Slate. He is the author of Hacking H(app)iness – Why Your Personal Data Counts and How Tracking it Can Change the World and has recently published his second title for Tarcher/Penguin, Heartificial Intelligence: Embracing Our Humanity to Maximize Machines. He will be speaking to the Empiricist League about what AI can teach us about consciousness, as well as the ramifications for conscious machines on our world.

6. @johnchavens

7. March, 2025
The Science

8. March, 2025

9. Now, the answer to the question about AI being a form of mind is a
traightforward “NO” if we assume that mind and consciousness
omprise more than information processing.
he obvious argument is that consciousness is about being aware
f the internal and external world, about the capacity to feel and
xperience the world in a subjective manner.
Mind, Consciousness and Artificial Intelligence
Maria Cecilia Dedios, Somatosphere (April 6, 2016)

10. …Your subjective, conscious experience is just as real as the tree
utside your window or the photons striking your retina—even
hough you alone feel it.
Many philosophers and scientists today tend to dismiss the
ubjective and focus wholly on an objective, third-person reality—a
eality that would be just the same if men had no minds. They trea
ubjective reality as a footnote…or they announce that, actually, it
oesn’t even exist.
he Closing of the Scientific Mind
avid Gelernter, Commentary Magazine (January 1, 2014)

11. The Emotion

13. The attachments I describe do not follow from whether
omputational objects really have emotion or intelligence, because
hey do not. The attachments follow from what they evoke in their
sers.
Our new objects don’t so much “fool” us into thinking they are
ommunicating with us; roboticists have learned those few trigger
hat help us fool ourselves. We don’t need much. We are ready to
nter the romance.
lone Together: Why We Expect More from Technology and Less From Each Other
herry Turkle, Director of the MIT Initiative on Technology and Self

14. The Delight In The Data
it: Craig Berry
The Ethics

16. johnchavens.com