Nov. 2024 – Invited speaker for “AI and Consciousness” workshop, James M. Houston Centre for Humanity & the Common Good, Green College, Vancouver, BC
Abstract: In my talk, I built on Johannes Jaeger’s recent (2024) argument that current LLMs do not meet the criteria for agency identified by enactive cognitive science. I argued that, in addition to relying on enactivist descriptions of the structure of agency such as Jaeger’s, we must also use a phenomenological approach in order to identify the criteria that allow us to recognize conscious agency in any given entity. I then argued that transcendental subjectivity (and, in particular, the fundamental structure of time consciousness that Husserl calls “the living present”) is the condition for the possibility of conscious agency. I concluded with an argument that tried to show that current AI models are not the kinds of entities that could instantiate that structure.