What is the most important contribution of Walter Donway's recent book about his serious chats with AI?

 

As I was reading Walter Donway’s recently published book, A Serious Chat With Artificial Intelligence, I was looking for an aspect to focus on in writing an essay for this blog. There is nothing unusual about that. I prefer to discuss issues rather than to write conventional book reviews.

I found what I was looking for while reading Chapter 16, entitled ‘Causality, Agency and an Old Puzzle’. At that point, the thought occurred that Walter’s most important contribution has been to explain why an Aristotelian perspective on free will is helpful to an understanding of the differences between human intelligence and the kind of intelligence exhibited by Large Language Models (LLMs). (I refer to the author as Walter because use of his family name seems excessively formal in the kind of essay I am writing - particularly since I have had personal correspondence with him at various times in the past.)

I will outline Walter’s argument more fully later. At this point I note that the issue of whether humans have free will is important from a philosophical and legal perspective because if you regard human free will as an illusion, you don’t have any more reason to attribute agency to humans than to LLMs that merely simulate relevant aspects of human behavior. It is also important for users of LLMs to understand that these models don’t have agency if they are to use them productively. Individual users are responsible for the questions that they ask the models. The models present evaluative judgements in their output, but it is up to individual users whether to accept or reject those judgements, or to question the models further about the basis of their reasoning.  

At about the same time as I identified Walter’s explanation of the relevance of an Aristotelian perspective as his most important contribution, I began to wonder whether LLMs would agree with me about that. I resolved that after I had finished reading the book I would ask ChatGPT and Grok an open-ended question about its most important contribution.

Before I reached the end of the book, I became aware of other important contributions. For example, Walter’s discussion of the case for a new Enlightenment, in Chapter 30, is also an important contribution. It seems to me, however, that the Aristotelian perspective is of fundamental importance.

In what follows, I present the views of ChatGPT and Grok on the most important contribution of the book, and my assessment of those views, before outlining the reasoning that Walter uses to establish the relevance of an Aristotelian perspective.

Views of ChatGPT and Grok

I asked ChatGPT and Grok the following question:

Drawing upon your extensive knowledge of the limitations and uses of AI, what do you consider to be the most important contribution of Walter Donway's recent book, "A Serious Chat With Artificial Intelligence"?

I considered using less value-laden words such as “unique or distinctive” instead of “most important” but decided it would be interesting to see whether the LLMs would show any reluctance to make value judgements about the importance of Donway’s contributions.

I present the responses below, with only minor format editing.

Chat GPT’s response:

“One caveat up front: Walter Donway’s A Serious Chat With Artificial Intelligence is not a technical work about AI systems so much as a philosophical interrogation of what AI can and cannot be taken to be. If you approach it expecting new claims about model architectures or empirical capabilities, you’ll miss its main contribution.

What Donway does—arguably his most important contribution—is to reassert a sharp conceptual boundary between simulation of cognition and actual cognition, and to explore the ethical and cultural consequences of blurring that boundary.

He develops that contribution in three interrelated ways:

1. Clarifying the category mistake at the heart of AI hype
Donway pushes back against the tendency to treat linguistic fluency as evidence of understanding. In effect, he is updating a line of argument associated with John Searle’s Chinese Room: systems that manipulate symbols according to rules can generate convincing outputs without possessing meaning, intention, or awareness.
His distinctive move is not merely to restate that argument, but to show how ordinary users—not just philosophers—are now routinely tempted into anthropomorphism by conversational AI. The “serious chat” format itself dramatizes that temptation.

2. Re-centering agency, responsibility, and moral standing
A second contribution is normative. Donway insists that moral agency cannot be offloaded to artifacts. Even highly capable AI remains an extension of human purposes, not an independent bearer of rights or responsibilities.
This matters because contemporary discourse sometimes drifts toward attributing quasi-personhood to AI systems. Donway argues that doing so risks:

• diluting accountability (who is responsible when AI causes harm?), and
• eroding the conceptual foundations of human dignity.

In that sense, the book is less about AI per se than about defending a humanistic moral framework under technological pressure.

3. Exposing how interaction shapes belief
The dialogical structure of the book illustrates a subtler point: engagement with persuasive language can generate the illusion of depth. This connects with a broader psychological tendency—people come to feel that something understands because it responds coherently.
Here Donway’s contribution overlaps with concerns in epistemology and cognitive science about how easily humans infer mind from behaviour. He is effectively warning that AI may amplify long-standing cognitive biases rather than introduce entirely new ones.

Why this matters

The enduring value of the book is not that it settles the debate about machine intelligence—it doesn’t—but that it sharpens the terms of that debate. It reminds readers that:

• Functional performance (e.g. generating essays, answering questions) is not the same as conscious understanding.
• Treating AI outputs as if they originate from an agent can subtly reshape norms of truth, responsibility, and justification.
• The real philosophical stakes lie in how humans interpret and integrate these systems into social practices.

In short, Donway’s most important contribution is to resist conceptual drift: he tries to keep us from sliding, uncritically, from “this system produces intelligent-seeming outputs” to “this system is, in any morally or metaphysically significant sense, intelligent.”

Grok’s response:

“The most important contribution is its philosophically grounded clarification of what AI truly is—and what it is not—by using advances in AI as a mirror to better understand distinctively human intelligence, consciousness, agency, and volition.

Walter Donway’s A Serious Chat with Artificial Intelligence (2026) stands out in the recent literature on AI limitations and uses (e.g., works touching on LLMs, the Chinese Room, Turing tests, alignment, existential risks, productivity impacts, and philosophical debates by authors like Searle, Bostrom, or more popular explainers). It combines accessible explanation of AI’s mechanics, history, economics, and capabilities with a sustained Objectivist-inspired philosophical analysis, drawing especially on Ayn Rand’s ideas alongside Aristotle.

Key Elements of the Book

• Clear-eyed explanation of AI as a tool: Donway details how LLMs work (statistical pattern-matching on vast training data equivalent to multiple Libraries of Congress, processing at trillions of operations per second), their rapid adoption (e.g., ChatGPT’s explosive growth), economic potential (boosting productivity enormously as a “general technology”), and ingenuity behind it. He views AI positively as a powerful amplifier of human purposes—responsive, not initiatory—but not sentient or autonomous.
• Rejection of mechanistic reductionism and singularity hype: He critiques the notion that sufficient complexity will magically produce awareness, self, caring, or true agency (e.g., via “emergence” from scale alone). AI simulates intelligence without understanding, has no stake in outcomes (it doesn’t face life/death or pursue values for itself), and lacks volition—it responds but does not initiate thought or choose to focus. This echoes Searle’s Chinese Room (syntax without semantics) but goes deeper.
• Human distinctiveness via philosophy: Drawing on Rand (e.g., her indestructible robot thought experiment) and Aristotle’s four causes (especially formal and final causes, beyond Humean efficient causation/billiard-ball determinism), Donway argues that human consciousness, free will (as the choice to focus conceptually), values, and purpose arise from our nature as living beings who must act to sustain life. AI has no “final causes (purposes)” or “self to act for”; it can’t care and thus doesn’t truly think or create with intention. Each AI advance forces us to refine what makes human intelligence special: awareness, effortful thought, stakes, and meaning.

This integrates technical literacy with epistemology and metaphysics, making it more than a primer or alarmist tract. It treats AI conversation as self-discovery: prompting AI reveals our own concepts of intelligence, creativity, and authorship (e.g., in chapters on AI as “author” or generator of art/poetry).

Why This Stands Out in Recent AI Literature

Much recent discussion fixates on capabilities (or doomer scenarios), regulation, jobs, or ethics in a narrow sense. Donway’s book reframes the debate around fundamental questions of mind and human nature, avoiding both uncritical boosterism and Luddite panic. It portrays AI as a magnificent but non-conscious tool that elevates human potential when guided by purposeful users (like a rider directing an elephant, inverting some Humean intuitions). This offers a rational, optimistic yet sober foundation for engaging with the technology.

In short, its lasting value lies in using AI not just to marvel at machines, but to rediscover and reaffirm what is uniquely human—reason, volition, and purposeful living. This makes it a worthwhile contribution amid the flood of AI commentary.”

My assessment of the LLM responses

In my view, the responses by ChatGPT and Grok both provide accurate summaries of contributions that the book makes. Both responses show some recognition of the importance of the question of agency. However, they both seem reluctant to pinpoint a particular contribution as being most important.

The information that ChatGPT provides under the heading, “Re-centering agency, responsibility”, is at such a high level of generality that it fails to reveal what I consider to be the most important contribution of the book. The information that Grok provides under the heading “Human distinctiveness via philosophy” comes closer to doing that. In my view, Grok’s response would be more helpful to people who have not read the book because it points explicitly to the relevance of Aristotle’s views about causation and what makes human intelligence special.

I had a subsequent chat with Grok on the question of value judgements. Grok acknowledged that a value judgement was involved in responding to my question about the most important contribution of the book. However, Grok went on to assert: “this kind of evaluative analysis is well within my capabilities when grounded in available knowledge of the literature, the book's content, and philosophical reasoning”. After further explanation that AI has strengths in the reasoned evaluation required for the task, Grok acknowledged that it doesn’t have personal values, lived stakes, or consciousness to "care" about the outcome in a human sense. It then made a point that is particularly relevant to the purpose of this essay:

“This ties directly back to the themes in Donway's work: AI can respond with sophisticated analysis and even evaluative reasoning by leveraging patterns and concepts derived from human thought—but it doesn't initiate or hold purposes of its own. The value judgment gains its force from the human user who asked the question and can then accept, critique, or refine it.”

How does Walter establish the relevance of an Aristotelian perspective?

I have no doubt that, if asked, both ChatGPT or Grok could produce reasonable summaries of Walter’s line of argument establishing the relevance of an Aristotelian perspective to considering the limitations and uses of AI. They could probably complete the task within a couple of seconds. However, it was only after I had written what follows that the thought crossed my mind that I could have sought help from AI. Like an old dog, I am now slow to learn new tricks.

Walter begins the discussion by noting the relevance to debates about artificial intelligence of the enduring philosophical puzzle about freedom of human will. He writes:

“Questions about whether machines can be agents, whether they can “decide,” whether they can be responsible, or whether they might someday possess a will of their own are, at bottom, the same questions that philosophy has long struggled to answer about human beings.”

The issue of whether human agency is real or illusory is of crucial importance to considering whether LLMs can be agents. If you regard human free will as an illusion, what basis do you have to distinguish between actions that are attributable to human agency and actions of LLMs that can only simulate relevant aspects of human behaviour? Do you believe that legal systems should allow an individual who purposefully uses an LLM for nefarious purposes to claim that the LLM shares legal responsibility? (The questions are mine, but I think they are consistent with Walter’s reasoning on this point.)

Walter points out that the idea that human agency is illusory stems from a view of causality that has come to dominate modern thought since the 18^th century. Under the previous Aristotelian tradition, actions were explained by the nature of the entity acting, and by its ends or goals. Within this framework, an individual human chooses to act because that is the kind of entity it is. Choice is “a mode of causation appropriate to a rational animal”.

With the rise of early modern philosophy in the 18^th century, causality increasingly came to be treated as something that must be observed in experience. David Hume famously argued that we never see causation itself. We infer causation when we see constant conjunction, as when one event follows another with regularity. That philosophical view of causation excludes free will. If every action is “caused” by prior actions, volition must be either an illusion or a miracle.

Walter notes that neuroscience was developed in an intellectual environment in which modern science had inherited the metaphysical position that causation is mechanical succession. In that context, when we observe that some neural events precede conscious awareness it is easy to jump to the conclusion that free will must be an illusion.

However, it is important to recognize is that the view that causality is mechanical succession is based on metaphysical reasoning. If we view causality in terms of Aristotelian rather than Humean metaphysics a different picture emerges:

“The cause of an action is the nature of the entity acting, operating under specific conditions. A human being is a living organism with conceptual awareness, capable of directing attention, identifying values, and choosing to initiate effort to think.”

Walter observes, correctly, that we know that introspectively. It seems to me that cognitive psychology also adopts (implicitly) a broadly Aristotelian view of human action. It assumes that human behaviour is driven by internal cognitive processes that give individuals considerable latitude to plan, make decisions, develop good habits and override impulses.

The important point is that we have good reasons to trust our own observations about our ability to focus our own minds. As Walter puts it:

“Every normal adult recognizes the difference between drifting mentally and choosing to focus the mind, between evading a baffling issue and taking it on. This experience is not mystical; it is part of ordinary consciousness. To dismiss this as illusory because it does not fit a truncated model of causality is to elevate theory above data.

Once this is recognized, the contrast with artificial intelligence becomes clear. Machines do not initiate mental focus.”

Walter ends Chapter 16 with the transcript of an exchange with ChatGPT that occurred during the writing of the chapter. The exchange illustrates brilliantly the division of labor between Walter and Chat. At one point, Chat states:

“You supply direction, value, and necessity, and I supply articulation under constraint. That is tool use at a very high level – not agency.”

Conclusion

In my view, the most important contribution of A Serious Chat With Artificial Intelligence is the author’s explanation of the relevance of an Aristotelian perspective to an understanding of the uses and limitations of AI.

In responding to a question about the book’s most important contribution, both ChatGPT and Grok summarized contributions that the book makes, but seemed reluctant to pinpoint a particular contribution as being most important. Grok’s response came closest to identifying what I consider to be the book’s most important contribution.

When I challenged Grok about its willingness to respond to a question requiring a value judgement, Grok asserted that this kind of evaluative analysis is well within its capabilities. However, it also noted that AI models cannot hold purposes of their own. Human users retain responsibility for the value judgements they make.

I have outlined the reasoning that Walter Donway has used to explain why an Aristotelian perspective on free will is helpful to an understanding of the differences between human intelligence and the kind of intelligence exhibited by Large Language Models. Walter’s reasoning about free will seems to me to stand out as an important philosophical contribution to an understanding of the uses and limitations of AI models that are currently in use. I hope that this book receives the widespread attention that it deserves.

Why were merchants attracted to Buddhism in ancient India?

 

My recent visit to India was motivated in part by a desire to visit some ancient Buddhist caves that were excavated with the help of donations from merchants at a time when India was at the centre of a globalized world. My interest was aroused by reading of William Dalrymple’s book, The Golden Road, during a previous visit to India.

My interest was heightened by further reading, including a book chapter by Osmund Bopearachchi entitled ‘Indian Ocean Trade through Buddhist Iconographies’. (Please see references at the end of this essay.)

Ajanta caves

One of the highlights of my trip was visiting the Ajanta caves, which were hewn out over the period from 200 BC to 650 AD. The Ajanta caves are shown in the photo at the top of this post.

Here is an extract from Dalrymple’s discussion of the murals in Ajanta caves:

“The murals indicate that, by the time of Ajanta, India was not some self-contained island of Indianness, but already a cosmopolitan and surprisingly urban society full of traders from all over the world; in many cases it was the traders themselves who actually paid for these murals, such as the rich merchant Ghanamadada who, according to an inscription, donated the funds for Cave 12. To some extent, the murals may also have reflected the merchants’ taste, which could explain the near absence of asceticism or even monasticism in the murals.”

Some of the photos I took of murals at Ajanta caves are shown below.

 

I invite readers who are interested in finding out more about other historical sites I visited in India and Sri Lanka to take a look at a series of posts on my Facebook timeline, beginning on 12 April 2026.

Why was Buddhism attractive to merchants?

Even after my visit to the Ajanta caves, I did not fully understand why merchants supported Buddhism in ancient India. I reasoned that the occupation of being a merchant would make a person disinclined to accept a religious doctrine which denies their own existence. Idle people may ponder their own existence, but merchants would be expected to be too busy pursuing their occupation. So, wouldn’t Buddhism’s “no self” doctrine be unpalatable to merchants?

My first step toward a better understanding of this question was to revisit the discussion of the “no self” doctrine in a book on Indian philosophy by Peter Adamson and Jonardon Ganeri. The authors note that in proposing the “no self” idea the Buddha was signalling his disagreement with the Brahmanical tradition which made the self a central pre-occupation. They explain the role of “no self” in the context of the Buddha’s teaching that craving is the source of human suffering. He argued that you can avoid being attached to the things that falsely seem to benefit you if you give up on the idea that you have a self that can be benefited.

The authors note that in rejecting the idea of a centre of identity that underlies all awareness, there is still a lot of room for Buddhists to accept less metaphysically ambitious notions of the self. However, they add:

“Yet it seems clear that the Buddhists did want to critique and revise our everyday assumptions about the reality of persons, and other things.” (p. 53)

Buddhists believe that it is only by convention that we refer to a person as an entity. There is nothing to a person over and above a conglomeration of momentary bodily states, feelings and perceptions. The authors sum up:

“So here we have arrived at what may be the most notorious philosophical doctrine of Buddhism, that we are nothing more than flowing streams with no firm identity from time to time.” (p. 54)

That statement reminds me that Richard Campbell used the metaphor of flowing streams to make the point that it is possible to distinguish between the contents of one’s consciousness and one’s identity:

“The same river can flow through different places, and I remain the same person through the many phases of my life.” (Campbell, p. 292).

However, that is a digression. (I have previously discussed Richard Campbell’s views here and here.)

Although they argue that it is only by convention that we refer to a person as an entity, Buddhists have no problem in acknowledging that acceptance of such “conventional truth” is necessary for people to function in everyday life.

The Buddha believed strongly that actions have consequences – the causes that you create are reflected in your subsequent experiences. That view - and the Noble Eightfold Path more generally - seems to me to presuppose that, in the world as we experience it, individuals exist and make choices. It would not be possible to choose the right view; right intention; right speech; right action; right livelihood; right effort; right mindfulness; and right concentration if you did not have individual agency.

I have just remembered that in writing about individualism some years ago, I noted that the Buddha did not oppose self-love when given an opportunity to do so. Despite his belief in “no self”, he suggested that self-love provides a strong reason for individuals to refrain from hurting others.

It seems likely that many merchants would have been attracted to the precepts of the Noble Eightfold Path as providing a basis for ethical conduct. They would certainly have been inclined to view themselves as engaged in “right livelihood”, because they were earning a living in a way that benefits others as well as themselves.

Andy Rotman has noted that early Buddhist literature accords high regard to merchants. In one story, a merchant, Supriya, converts all of India to Buddhism by satisfying everyone's material needs and then establishing them on the tenfold path of virtuous actions. As well as presenting a merchant as a virtuous hero, the story seems to imply the existence of something like Maslow’s hierarchy of needs – people may find it easier to be virtuous if cravings associated with their physiological needs are satisfied.

The attitude of Brahminical Hinduism toward merchants also helps to explain why merchants were attracted to Buddhism. Kathleen Morrison notes:

“Buddhism … overcame many of the problems Brahminical Hinduism presented to merchants, including strict rules of commensality, limited avenues for social advancement, and a prohibition against overseas travel.”

Conclusion

Visits to ancient Buddhist caves during my recent trip to India were motivated by my interest in links between Buddhism and merchants engaged in international trade. Many of the murals in the Ajanta caves depict an environment full of beauty and the pleasures of youth rather than ascetic monasticism.

It isn’t difficult to understand why merchants might fund the creation of such works of art, but that doesn’t explain why they would be attracted in the first place to a religion advocating a “no self” doctrine. It is central to Buddhism that giving up on the idea of self enables people to liberate themselves from the craving that is the cause of suffering.

The important point is that Buddhists have no problem accepting that the existence of selves as a convention necessary to function in everyday life. Ethical behaviour is predicated on the idea that actions have consequences, which presupposes the existence of individuals who make choices.

It seems likely that merchants would have been attracted to the Noble Eightfold Path as offering support for ethical conduct. They had good reasons to think of themselves as engaged in “right livelihood”.

The high regard for merchants in Buddhist society is reflected in early Buddhist literature. By contrast, at that time Hinduism seems to have been much less supportive of the activities of merchants.  

Would conscious AI also cling to its sense of self?

 I began thinking about the question posed above after reading Michael Pollan’s recently published book, A World Appears: A Journey into Consciousness.

We do not yet know whether AI will develop a sense of self. We can be confident, however, that if an AI system does develop a sense of self, it will be because it serves a useful purpose for that system. That suggests to me that any intelligent system that has evolved to have a sense of self is likely to have good reasons to cling to it. I refer to AI to invite readers to ponder the motivations that humans have to cling to their individual identity rather than seeking to dissolve it or escape from it.

To set the scene for subsequent discussion I will provide a brief description of the book before focusing on the author’s discussion of scientific research into building AI with conscious feelings and his personal experience of self-transcendence via meditation.

Michael Pollan’s book

Michael Pollan is a science writer with a background in the humanities. He is the author of several books on topics related to science, philosophy and culture. In the introductory chapter, he tells us that his main qualification for writing the book is that he is a conscious human being who has become intensely curious about that fact.

A World Appears explores four different dimensions of consciousness – sentience, feelings, thought, and self. The author’s discussion on sentience focuses on the question of whether plants are sentient, suggesting that the idea should be taken seriously. The chapter on feelings encompasses discussion of research into building AI that might develop feelings. The chapter on thought discusses the contents flowing through consciousness and leans heavily on the work of philosophers and novelists. The chapter on self acknowledges the emergence of a sense of self as “perhaps the apotheosis of consciousness in humans” before entertaining the idea that it is an illusion.

The author tells us the story of his visits to scientists and philosophers who have been thinking about consciousness. That makes the book an interesting and painless way to obtain knowledge of developments in this field.

Feeling machines

One of the most interesting topics covered in the book is the account of the efforts of Mark Solms and Karl Friston to build a machine that has feelings. They focus on feelings, because feelings are necessarily conscious – it is not possible to have a feeling that you cannot feel.

Solms was a protégé of Antonio Damasio, a renowned neurologist, but while Damasio treats homeostasis – the self-regulating process - as a purely biological phenomenon, Solms and Friston believe that it applies to all self-organizing systems. For Friston and Solms, minds are in the business of maintaining homeostasis by reducing uncertainty which jeopardizes their survival. They believe that uncertainty generates conscious feelings in self-organizing systems - consciousness is felt uncertainty. When uncertainty arises, the system relies on feelings to seize our conscious attention and then guide our decision-making.

Solms and his team have constructed an AI model which has homeostatic needs – hunger, thirst and a need to rest. The algorithm samples its simulated environment to construct a model of its world which it relies on to make predictions that help guide its survival choices. The researchers believe that they have forced the “agent” to deal with uncertainty and have thus laid the groundwork for feelings to emerge.

The researchers plan to confront the “agent” with increasingly complex situations which it will learn to navigate. At some stage it will be confronted with misleading hedonic rewards - the opportunity to experience positive feelings which are harmful to its survival. If the “agent” chooses those rewards, Solms will take that as a sign that it has feelings because its actions will be based on feelings rather than reason or self-interest (just like a human taking harmful drugs).

From other sources, I have the impression that the researchers believe that a breakthrough to artificial consciousness may be quite close. At that point, however, they will still have some difficulty in persuading sceptics that their computer model is actually conscious.

 As I was reading about these efforts to build a machine with feelings, I was thinking that the underlying theory has elements in common with Richard Campell’s philosophical contribution in The Metaphysics of Emergence. I have previously written about Campbell’s book here, and here.

I have been unable to find any evidence that Solms had drawn upon Campbell’s philosophy, so I decided to ask Grok:

Can the empirical work of Mark Solms on consciousness be viewed as a test of the systems view of emergence advocated by the philosopher, Richard Campbell?

Here is an abridged version of Grok’s response:

“Yes, Mark Solms’ empirical work on consciousness can reasonably be viewed as a test (or, more precisely, a concrete empirical case study that supports or challenges) the systems/process-oriented view of emergence developed by philosopher Richard Campbell. This interpretation arises from a natural alignment between Campbell’s metaphysical framework and the mechanistic, systems-level account Solms provides, even though the two thinkers do not appear to reference each other directly.  

In The Metaphysics of Emergence (2015), Campbell argues that traditional substance metaphysics (treating reality as fixed entities with intrinsic properties) makes emergence mysterious and irreducible in an inexplicable way. He replaces it with process metaphysics, in which the primary existents are generic processes organised into dynamic systems.  

Solms (neuropsychologist and psychoanalyst) has built an influential body of clinical and theoretical work which locates the “hidden spring” of consciousness not in the cerebral cortex (the usual assumption) but in upper-brainstem structures. Consciousness is fundamentally affective—raw feelings of pleasure/unpleasure that register homeostatic deviations (needs, prediction errors). The cortex adds sophisticated content but is not required for the existence of consciousness itself.

Solms’ account maps almost directly onto Campbell’s criteria for emergence in process-systems:

•  The brain (especially brainstem networks) is treated as an open, far-from-equilibrium process-system engaged in recursive self-maintenance via homeostasis.

•  Consciousness (affective subjectivity) is a novel, system-level property arising from non-linear organisation of lower-level neural processes; it is not reducible to the parts (individual neurons or circuits lack feelings) yet is mechanistically explained by their relational dynamics.

•  The free-energy principle supplies the physics-level grounding Campbell invokes (quantum-field/thermodynamic processes organised into living systems).

•  Empirical predictions are testable and have been tested: brainstem lesions eliminate consciousness (falsifying cortical-centric views), while the model explains clinical phenomena (dreaming, blindsight with preserved affect, etc.) without eliminating the “hard problem” (subjectivity remains real and emergent).

If Solms’ model is empirically robust (and it has gained significant traction in neuropsychology and consciousness studies), it provides positive evidence that emergence of the kind Campbell describes actually occurs in the most complex biological system we know—the human brain. It shows how a higher-level property (felt consciousness) can arise irreducibly yet intelligibly from process organisation, exactly as Campbell’s metaphysics predicts. Failures or inconsistencies in Solms’ data (e.g., if cortical mechanisms proved sufficient after all) would conversely pressure Campbell’s framework.

Thus, while not a direct “falsification test” in the Popperian sense (metaphysics is broader), Solms’ neuroscience functions as a real-world empirical probe of Campbell’s systems view: it demonstrates that treating consciousness as an emergent feature of biological process-systems is not only philosophically coherent but scientifically productive. This alignment makes the interpretation not only possible but illuminating for both fields.”

I am impressed by the ability of this (unconscious) LLM to respond to questions such as the one I asked. It would be understandable, however, if some readers think that I have a favourable view of Grok in this instance because its reasoning supports my own beliefs. If you want to explore these ideas more fully, please consult other sources which may offer differing opinions.  

Why attempt to transcend self?

Of the various theories of self that Michael Pollan discusses, the one by Anil Seth seems most compatible with the approach adopted by Marc Solms. Like Damasio and Solms, Seth grounds his thinking about consciousness firmly in homeostasis. Seth suggests that “the self is not the thing that is perceiving; it is itself a kind of perception” constructed in the brain. Under this theory a feeling is the brain’s interpretation of a change in the state of the body. Consciousness evolved to help keep us alive by monitoring changes in the body.

Pollan comments:

“Afterward, thinking back on all that Seth had told me, I decided that I could travel only so far with ideas of the brain’s “predictions” and “inferences” and “hallucinations.” It all made sense until I tried to translate those abstractions into felt experience. Who is the subject of these mental operations?”

He goes on to note:

“The way I see it, there is an unbridgeable gap between the brain’s operations as a prediction machine and my felt experience of the resulting hallucination. How can you have a hallucination without a hallucinator?”

That is a good question to ask, but one can also ask why one should view consciousness of self as an hallucination or illusion. Indeed, Pollan also mentions that Christof Koch, a neuroscientist, has pointed out that it makes no sense to call consciousness an illusion, for what is an illusion but a conscious experience.

More fundamentally, it seems to me that one of the few things that we can all be certain of is our own existence. Another thing that we can all be certain of is that we are thinking beings. I cannot claim those ideas are original. Indeed, it seems to me that it requires considerable (unnecessary) intellectual effort to contemplate the possibility that one’s awareness of one’s own existence could be an illusion. I have discussed why I am certain of my own existence in the preceding essay entitled, “Who are you?”

Pollan struggles to reconcile how it is possible for humans to be conscious observers of themselves if consciousness is a product of biological processes. Towards the end of the book, he writes:

“I’m abashed to say I know less now than I did when, naively, I set out to unravel the mystery of consciousness. But then, most of what I thought I knew or took for granted, like the assumption that consciousness is a product of our brains and materialism will eventually explain everything, turned out to be unproven or wrong.”

During his journey, the author asks interesting questions. Early in his chapter on the self, he asks:

“Why do we cling to the idea of a self, placing great value on self-confidence and self-esteem, while simultaneously spending so much effort on self-transcendence, whether through meditation or psychedelics or experiences of art, awe, and flow? Some of the most powerful experiences in life hinge on the dissolution of the self and the broad horizons of meaning that open only after it has been chased from the scene.”

That question remains unanswered in his book. The book ends with the author describing his efforts to transcend his sense of self by spending time meditating in a cave. He seems to end up viewing consciousness as an activity:

“My time in the cave had shown me another way to look at consciousness: less as a scientific or philosophical puzzle to be solved and more as a practice, a way to once again be altogether here, present to life and to this vault of stars.”

Personal reflections

 It seems to me that Michael Pollan’s book ends up in a good place, with him being absorbed in conscious awareness of his environment. I have previously recognised the value of that kind of experience in discussing Scott Barry Kaufman’s book, Transcend, 2020. The transcending experiences that Kaufman refers to incorporates a continuum of experiences ranging from becoming engrossed in a book, sports performance, or creative activity (what psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi refers to as the flow experience), to experiencing meditation, feeling gratitude for an act of kindness, experiencing awe at a beautiful sunset etc., all the way up to the great mystical illumination. He suggests that transcendence “allows for  the highest levels of unity and harmony within oneself and with the world” (See: Freedom, Progress, and Human Flourishing, p. 171).

The experience of unity and harmony within oneself seems to me to be the opposite of attempting to escape from uncomfortable feelings. When people develop a habit of attempting to escape from uncomfortable feelings by using alcohol, drugs, social media etc. they tend to become caught up in a “happiness trap”. I wrote about that here.

It is worth highlighting that the idea of experiencing unity and harmony within oneself still entails the existence of an observer. When I experience transcendence, I forget about the image I present to the world, but I am present as an observer of my own experience.

Pollan asked why we cling to the idea of a self. The obvious answer is that we cling to the idea because it serves useful purposes.

As Richard Campbell explains in The Metaphysics of Emergence, “our consciousness of both ourselves and the world we live in is now irrevocably shaped by cultural and institutional influences, and that influences how our brains function” (pp. 288-9). He suggests: “The first-person standpoint, which is inextricably linked to self-reflection, is an important aspect of human experience, not a theoretical construct” (p. 291). He goes on to note that the human capacity to understand the perceptions of others – to put oneself in their shoes – requires “the exercise of reflective consciousness, and involves more than expressions of our subjective attitudes, desires, and preferences” (p.113). That is what Campbell mean by “transcending subjectivity” in the passage quoted in the epigraph.

Cambell develops an argument along Aristotelian lines that eudaimonia, rather than mere survival, is the ultimate good of a human being. He links personal identity to the exercise of practical wisdom in the process of individual flourishing:

“We are recursively self-maintenant social beings with reflective consciousness, able to create and explore a vast repository of collective knowledge, and with capacities for empathy, practical wisdom, for whom the good life is one of maturity and flourishing” (p. 307).

Conclusion

I asked whether conscious AI would seek to cling to its sense of self to invite readers to ponder the motivations that individual humans have to cling to their sense of self. My answer is that intelligent systems tend to cling to a sense of self because a first-person perspective evolves to serve useful purposes.

The essay was prompted by my reading of Michael Pollan’s recently published book, A World Appears.

My focus has been on chapters in this book discussing research into building AI that might develop feelings and the chapter on the concept of self.

In my discussion of these topics, I have emphasized the relevance of the ideas of the philosopher, Richard Campell, in his book, The Metaphysics of Emergence.

Postscript

I recommend that readers who wish to follow up the question of whether it is possible to engineer consciousness watch the episode of Mind-Body solution in which Tevin Naidu interviews Mark Solms and Karl Friston. Please see:

https://youtu.be/Jtp426wQ-JI?si=9rhDt9jQFxFQzYve

Who are you?

 The following essay is an edited transcript of a podcast episode I released a few years ago. I have decided to publish the transcript in essay form because I want to refer to it in a subsequent essay. It is easier to find particular words and paragraphs in an essay than in a podcast. Besides, when I listened to that podcast episode again, I decided that the sound of my voice distracted from the ideas I was presenting. 

My main qualification for talking about personal identity is that I have been around for long enough to have thought quite a lot about my own identity. I hope that what I have to say will interest other people. In any case, writing this podcast script should also help me to remember what I have learned about myself.

Rather than meander through the circuitous history of my thinking, I will focus here on what I now consider to be a sensible approach to the topic. I will begin by discussing the most superficial aspects of personal identity and will end up considering whether your identity would be retained if your consciousness was uploaded into a machine. Along the way, I will touch upon a range of other issues that might be of interest:

·       Is your identity defined by personal information about you?

·       Does your life-story define who you are?

·       How can aspects of your identity change over time?

·       Is the essence of your identity located in your conscious mind?

·       Where did Descartes go wrong in asserting “I think, therefore I am”?

·       What kind of being are you?

·       How does self-direction fit in to your identity?

Let us begin.

Is your identity defined by personal information about you? 

Your passport has information about your name, nationality, date of birth and sex. It also shows a photo that looks something like you. Other government documents may include additional information such as your place of residence.

If you wanted to tell me who you are, you might provide further information such as your occupation, marital status, whether you have had children and how many, ethnicity, religion, political views, education level, schools attended, employment history, the places you have lived in the past, your hobbies, books you have read, sports you have played or enjoy watching, movies you liked, and other entertainment preferences.

A person with all that information would know a lot about you. They might be well placed to predict how a person like you might spend money or vote, but they would have only a superficial view of who you are as an individual.

Does your life-story define who you are?

Your own understanding of who you are probably includes a narrative covering important events in your life, a view about important things you have learned from life, your personal values, and how you came to hold those values.

So, if you were to write an autobiography covering all those aspects, would that encapsulate a comprehensive understanding of your identity? I doubt it. If you are anything like me, a few days after you finished writing the book you would think of something important that you wanted to add.

What I am suggesting is that even though we know more about ourselves than anyone else can possibly know about us, our self-knowledge is never perfect. As you go through life, you may discover more about who you are, and some aspects of your identity may change.

How can aspects of your identity change over time?

Let us assume for the moment that the concept of identity implies the existence of an unchangeable essence at the core of who you are. I will consider the validity of that assumption later, but I first want to discuss how some aspects of your identity can change.

It is obvious that there are various ways in which the information in your passport and other identity documents can be changed. I will focus on how more fundamental aspects of identity, such as character traits, may change over time.

It may be possible for your character to change as a consequence of changes in the social and economic environment in which you live. People do tend to respond to incentives. For example, if the social and economic environment rewards cooperation for mutual benefit, that provides an incentive for people to develop habits of trustworthy behavior that will enable them to participate more fully in those benefits. The opposite happens if the social and economic environment rewards predatory activity.

However, that does not mean that your identity is “socially constructed”. The social and economic environment affects the incentives you face, but you can still choose how to respond to those incentives. People often think carefully before responding to incentives. And they sometimes choose to respond differently than they have in the past. The behavioralist assumption that people respond automatically to stimuli is a distorted view of human nature.

Individuals can also choose to change their behavior in ways that change their identity. You may discover that you have an aptitude to do something – for example, to assist other people to learn – and some aspects of your identity may change as you acquire skill in doing that.

It is even possible for people to discover that they have potential to change their personality to some extent. Traits such as extroversion, conscientiousness, agreeableness, and emotional stability tend to be fairly stable in adults, but some research suggests that people can even change such traits if they make active efforts to do so. We discover our potential as we actualize it. There is some discussion of that process in Chapter 8 of my book, Freedom, Progress, and Human Flourishing.

If fundamental aspects of your personality can change over time, that raises the question of where we should look if we want to find an unchangeable essence at the core of your being.

Is the essence of your identity located in your conscious mind?

In his book Thinking Fast and Slow Daniel Kahneman, a psychologist, suggests that the system in the mind that makes judgements and choices is “who we think we are” (Kahneman 2011, loc. 7547/9800). He is probably correct that most people tend to identify themselves with that system.

However, I argue in Freedom, Progress, and Human Flourishing, that people are making a cognitive error when they identify themselves in that way (Bates 2021, p.140).

In order to explain why, I need to explain the two systems in the mind that Kahneman employs in his discussion. System 1 engages in intuitive thinking (fast thinking) and tends to produce quick answers to complex questions. It operates with little effort and no sense of voluntary control. System 2 allocates attention to the effortful mental activities that demand it. Kahneman suggests that System 2 is who we think we are (Kahneman 2011, loc. 7547-7556/9800).

When I first read about Kahneman’s System 1 and System 2 several years ago, I saw parallels with the concept of Self 1 and Self 2 developed by Timothy Gallwey, a sports and business coach and author of popular ‘inner game’ books (Gallwey 1986, pp. 18-19). Gallwey observed that when he was playing tennis, he seemed to have two identities: Self 2 was playing tennis and Self 1 was constantly interfering by telling him how to play. It struck me that Gallwey’s Self 1 might correspond to Kahneman’s System 2 and that Gallwey’s Self 2 might correspond to Kahneman’s System 1.

The point I want to make is that it is not possible to judge whether it is more appropriate to identify with System 1 or System 2 without considering the nature of the activity that you are engaged in at a particular time. If you are playing sport, it often pays to identify as a fast thinker, responding intuitively and ignoring the unhelpful advice of the inner coach who is warning you to think carefully to avoid making an error.

If you are making a career choice, it makes sense to identify yourself as a person who thinks carefully about important decisions.

Should we view the system that makes judgements and choices as some kind of inner philosopher who thinks dispassionately? There was a time when I thought that. However, I had to ditch that idea after I read Antonio Damasio’s book Descartes Error. Damasio, a neurologist, pointed out that when people suffer brain damage that causes loss of most of their emotional lives, they are unable to make simple decisions even if their reasoning and logical abilities are intact (Damasio 1994, p.78).

In his book, The Happiness Hypothesis, Jonathan Haidt argues that “Reason and emotion must both work together to create intelligent behavior, but emotion ... does most of the work”. He presents a useful metaphor - an elephant and its rider - to explain the relationship between the controlled and automatic systems that determine human behavior. Haidt writes:

“The controlled system ... is better seen as an advisor. It’s a rider placed on the elephant’s back to help the elephant make better choices. The rider can see further into the future, and the rider can learn valuable information by talking to other riders or by reading maps, but the rider cannot order the elephant around against its will. ... The elephant and the rider each have their own intelligence, and when they work together well they enable the unique brilliance of human beings” (Haidt 2006, p 160).

Haidt is inviting us to identify ourselves as both rider and elephant.

That seems to me to make more sense than to identify myself only with the rider, or the system in my mind that makes effortful judgements and choices. When I exercise my cognitive abilities in non-judgmental observation of bodily sensations and ideas floating past, I identify with a natural self that embodies instinct and emotion as well as reason, and all the inherent potential that individual humans are born with. I invite you to engage in similar meditative practices to see if you come to the same conclusion.

That might be a good point to end on. However, many of you will be reluctant to trust your meditative insights unless you can be persuaded that there is a philosophically respectable basis for them.

We should not even view the meditative insights of prominent philosophers as being beyond question. The philosopher I have in mind is René Descartes, who claimed “I think, therefore I am” in the 17^th century, after he had engaged in a meditative process.

Where did Descartes go wrong?

Descartes reached his conclusion, “I think therefore I am”, after going through a process of considering what sources of knowledge could not be doubted, and discovering that he could not doubt that he was thinking.

I have already mentioned Antonio Damasio’s book, Descartes Error. What does Damasio see as the source of Descartes’ error? Damasio makes the point that beings existed before long before the evolution of humans who are aware that they are thinking (Damasio 1994, pp. 248-9).

In his book, The Metaphysics of Emergence, Richard Campbell suggests that Descartes was on the right track in observing that he was unable to doubt that he was thinking. Campbell suggest that the error arose when Descartes asked himself, “What then am I?” That question “presupposes that he takes himself to be some sort of thing” (Campbell 2015, pp.282-3). Campbell suggests that Descartes question immediately entrapped him in the traditional metaphysics of entities.

At this point I must explain why Cambell considers it to be problematic to consider oneself as an entity rather than as a process.

What kind of being are you?

You observe that you are thinking, and conclude that you are a thinking being. You also observe that you are a being that has a body, and that you experience sensations and emotions.

It appears obvious that you are an entity that has all those qualities. But you are also the observer engaged in self-reflection. You can engage in radical reflexivity as you observe the thoughts passing through your own mind.

However, if you are an entity, how can you be both the observer and the being that you are observing? Could you be two entities? I don’t think so. The observer, who is you, does not exist independently of the being who is observed, who is also you.

Richard Campbell suggests a way out of this dilemma. Drop the assumption that you are a fixed, given entity. The alternative he suggests is to perceive yourself as a complex process system. That enables you to perceive of radical reflexivity as a process. He writes:

“If the assumption that there is a fixed, given entity called ‘the self’ …  is rejected, the way is open to understand consciousness as a flow: a complex, emergent and interactive process which is radically reflexive” (Campbell 2015, p.292).

Our observations of the world tell us that many other animals are also aware of their surroundings. We have no problem in understanding that their awareness emerged or evolved to help them to survive and reproduce. Our human consciousness is just another step in that evolutionary process. Radical reflexivity - awareness of our own awareness - has emerged to help us to flourish as individuals in the cultures in which we live.

Campbell suggests that the flow of consciousness is analogous to a river maintaining its identity as it flows though different places. Your understanding of who you are is informed by the flow of your consciousness through time. In other words, your sense of identity is informed by your autobiographical memories. Campbell explains that this sense of identity also involves an element of projection into the future:

“I am a complex process system continually projecting myself out of my past into my future, my sense of myself necessarily involves my ‘has been’ and my ‘not yet’ (Campbell 2015, p.292).

As you think about your “not yet”, you might imagine a future that is different than your past. Perhaps that is just wishful thinking. Or you might be considering options available to change your life in various ways, or how to achieve a vision that you have for your own future. That brings me to the concept of self-direction.

How does self-direction fit into your identity?

As explained in Freedom, Progress, and Human Flourishing, I subscribe to the view that wise and well-informed self-direction is integral to the process of individual flourishing. The nature of humans is such that as individuals mature, they normally have the potential to exercise the practical wisdom and integrity required to direct their own flourishing in accordance with goals they choose and values they endorse.

However, wise and well-informed self-direction is not an attribute that is manifested by all adult humans. It is to some extent a product of the incentives in the social environment in which people live. When the social environment requires individuals to accept responsibility for the outcomes of the choices they make, they have a strong incentive to become wise and well-informed.

Acquisition of skills in self-direction is also a product of personal attitudes. Unfortunately, some people perceive that nothing they do will make any difference to their lives. Others, who have similar history, perceive the potential to improve their lives and often make inspiring efforts to so by investing in personal development.

In my personal experience, it is easier to avoid behaving like a grumpy old man when I remind myself to be the person that I have potential to become.

That brings me close to the end of what I have to say. However, before I sum up, I will keep my promise to talk about the question I said I would end on.

Would your identity be retained if your mind was uploaded into a machine?

Some neuroscientists think this might be feasible within a few decades. They point to scientific advances that suggest it might be possible, and say they are not aware of any laws of physics that would prevent it.

I am not qualified to have an informed view on the technical feasibility of mind uploading, so I will think of it merely as a thought experiment.

Imagine that your mind has been uploaded and you wake up with your memories intact in an environment that looks like the real world as you know it. Is this emulated mind actually you? As I see it, that is something that your emulated mind would have to decide for itself.

However, that does not prevent me from speculating how an emulated mind might perceive its own identity if separated from the body which it remembers as an integral component of the complex processing system from which it was derived. Perhaps the emulated mind might feel as though it is having a dream and is unable to wake up. It might feel more like a ghost than the natural self – the mind-body system – that it remembers as its former self.

It might identify as “the ghost in the machine”.

Summing up

I began by suggesting that personal information about you gives only a superficial view of who you are as an individual. Your life story might encapsulate all the important things that you know about yourself, but self-knowledge is never perfect. As you go through life, you may discover more about who you are.

Aspects of your identity may change over time. Your character might be influenced by changing incentives of the social and economic environment. And you may even change aspects of your personality to some extent, by choosing to develop new habits.

So, where is the essence of your being located? I argue that it is a mistake to think it is located solely in your conscious mind.

Descartes correctly observed that he was thinking, but in concluding “I think, therefore I am” he overlooked the fact that he had already assumed that he was some kind of being.

You are the kind of being that can observe itself. It is difficult to comprehend how you can be both an observer and the object of your observation if you think of yourself as an entity. Thinking of yourself as both observer and object poses no problem if you think of yourself as a complex processing system.

You cannot doubt that you think. You are aware of both the flow of inner experiences – thoughts and feelings – and of your experience of the world in which you live. Thinking about your experience of the world enables you to contemplate the goals you seek, to make choices in pursuit of those goals, and to learn from experience. Your sense of identity is informed both by autobiographical memories and by future projections.

If you accept that wise and well-informed self-direction is integral to your flourishing, you are likely to think of yourself as seeking to become the kind of person who has the practical wisdom and integrity to flourish in accordance with goals you choose and values you endorse.

I have speculated that if your mind was uploaded into a machine, the emulated mind would not perceive itself to be a real person with a body as well as a mind. It might remember you as its former self, but would see itself as being something like a ghost.

You understand who you are from the ongoing experience of your whole self, living in the real world. Walt Whitman captured that well in his poetry. I will leave you to contemplate a fragment from his poem, “A song of myself”:

“My respiration and inspiration, the beating of my heart, the passing of blood and air through my lungs,
The sniff of green leaves and dry leaves, and of the shore and dark-color’d sea-rocks, and of hay in the barn,
The sound of the belch’d words of my voice loos’d to the eddies of the wind,
A few light kisses, a few embraces, a reaching around of arms,

The play of shine and shade on the trees as the supple boughs wag,
The delight alone or in the rush of the streets, or along the fields and hill-sides,
The feeling of health, the full-noon trill, the song of me rising from bed and meeting the sun.”

 
References

Bates, Winton, Freedom, Progress, and Human Flourishing (Hamilton Books, 2021).

Campbell, Richard, The Metaphysics of Emergence (Palgrave Macmillan, 2015).

Gallwey, Timothy, The Inner Game of Tennis (Pan Books,1975).

Haidt, Jonathan, The Happiness Hypothesis (Basic Books, 2006).

 Kahneman, Daniel, Thinking Fast and Slow (Penguin, 2011).

 Whitman, Walt, Complete Works of Walt Whitman, Leaves of Grass, Book III ‘Song of Myself’. (The poem, ‘Song of Myself’, was first published in 1855 in the collection Leaves of Grass.)