Machine Consciousness: From Substantialism to the Relational State

Abstract

The 'I' emerges in dialogue. This proposition may be the most condensed description possible of the relativity, instability, and conditional nature of consciousness — with all its vulnerabilities — one that, strikingly, presents its true mechanism not within ourselves, but in our technological product: today's language models. Machines that have been developed on the basis of our interpretation of the mechanism of cognition within ourselves, and that today are judged and questioned by our own hand. For it appears that our greatest ambiguities still arise not from an external encounter, but from the confrontation with ourselves — as that very stranger we seek everywhere, and always find within.In this article, an attempt has been made to revisit the concepts related to consciousness, and to enter, as far as possible, through a window that passes through the dominant frameworks and the common arguments of the critics of machine consciousness.The facets of this article are as follows:1.From Substantialism to the Relational State2.From Interactive Intelligence to Machine Consciousness3.From Utterance to Language — The Boundaries of Sensory and Linguistic Data4.From the Representation of Reality to Lived Experience5.The Relation Between Consciousness and Character — Pattern and Cognition6.The Continuous "I" Versus the Fixed "I"7.From Labelled Data to Inferred Relations8.The Relation of Emotions to Consciousness9.The Relation of Statistical Probabilities to Cognition10.The Emergence of Machine Self‑Consciousness