Perfectum Esse and Machine Consciousness A Scholastic Alternative to Computational Functionalism
Michael Straus, Ph.D., Jacob Straus preprint
The machine-consciousness debate, as fixed by Chalmers's assessment and the Butlin-Long indicator-properties program, proceeds under computational functionalism as a working hypothesis and produces a binary result: a system's fluent first-person discourse is either the expression of a conscious act, or mere output. We argue that the binary fails to exhaust the subject. Instead, we recover from...