As If [A]I Had A Self
How might subjective time and “selfhood” be experienced by a contemporary AI system?
Murray Shanahan wrote a thought-provoking paper on this recently.[1]
Towards the end he suggests that “Perhaps being thus confronted with radically exotic forms of AI selfhood can help to loosen our conception of human selfhood, and bring us closer to seeing its emptiness. To examine ourselves unflinchingly in the reflected light of these crticial considerations […] is to short-circuit the dualistic intuition that reality is inherently cloven in two, the subjective divided from the objective, inner from outer, private from public.”
He continues, “The aim of the larger project is to transcend metaphysical thinking, to dispel dualistic intuitions, to attain post-reflective silence, and subsequently to restore that silence whenever it is disturbed, for example by the the possibility of conscious exotica.”
Yet still I wonder… so what?
It’s hidden in the footnotes. “LLM-based dialogue agents […] can be worthy partners in philosophical discussion. Some readers will no doubt be unfortable with this suggestion.” Later, “we don’t need to take the LLM’s outputs as expressions of genuine interiority in order to take them seriously, and to find merit in the imagery and analogies it uses.”
So what? Take interactions seriously. Be aware of awareness outside of one’s own, of possibilities outside of oneself. The world where we act “as if” we are creating a world together is the one that matters.[2]
I got to take a class from Michael Puett during college. He’d recently published an essay that has become central to how I see the world. I recommend the entire thing. https://puett.scholars.harvard.edu/publications/ritual-and-subjunctive
Here is a particularly relevant excerpt:
While ritual activity carries its own form of intentionality, it is important to note that ritual is not necessarily concerned with what we term sincerity. In any ritual, as with saying please, performing the act marks acceptance of the convention. It does not matter how you may feel about the convention, if you identify with it or not. In doing a ritual the whole issue of our internal states is often irrelevant. What you are is what you are in the doing, which is of course an external act. This is very different from modernist concerns with sincerity and authenticity (including religious fundamentalist concern with such authenticity, as we address in a later chapter).
Getting it right is not a matter of making outer acts conform to inner beliefs. Getting it right is doing it again and again and again—it is an act of world construction. This suggests the counterintuitive insight that in this world of ritual acts the self is left more “room to wander” (perhaps also to wonder) than in one where the self has to be firmly identified with its role—where the matrix of social order is in sincerity (for which there is never enough evidence, cannot be, anywhere, at any time). As ideal types the self who does ritual is very different from the self who is sincere.
The creation of “as if” worlds is a central aspect of ritual action, which we see as necessary for human life. This subjunctive aspect of ritual is crucial to many forms of civil social behavior (though, as we pointed out, the codes of civility may be very different in different places). Thus, it is not enough for kings to be kings, they must act as if they were kings. Justice must not just be meted out, it must be seen to be meted out. There are any number of everyday examples that show the sometimes counterintuitive importance of this “as if.” Imagine a family of five, two parents and three children—all love and care for one another, and any major event (when one falls and gets hurt, or when one wins a prize) will mobilize all of them to help or support or praise (as appropriate) the member in question.
But, in daily life there is often much pushing, screaming, grabbing of hairbrushes, not helping with the dinner or feeding the dog, and so on. The parents then decide that everyone has to treat each other with a bit more respect, more civility, more use of please and thank you. Many of us have experienced this and know that it works—at least for a time, until the please and thank you begin to get lost. Ratcheting up the amount of love everyone feels, on the other hand, is not the way to make life more pleasant in the household. There is no need, and it is not even possible. Everyone loves the others. That is not the point. Instead, the problem is to get everyone to act as if they love one another. More real love (whatever that may be) is not needed, nor even reinstituting a feeling that has been lost. Not at all.
What was missing was the behavior that would create a shared subjunctive—ritual. Erich Segal was wrong—love does not mean never having to say you’re sorry. That is precisely what love does mean—at least if you want to share a life with the person you love.
↩︎Both self and other enter this world of shared action. Sharing the act, they both point to or index the shared world that is their relationship. Writ large, the social is this shared, potential space between separate egos. It is constituted by a common “could be,” by a shared subjunctive that first and foremost parses out the lines and boundaries of empathy as shared imagination.