Simulacra as conscious exotica

2024/12/01 by Murray Shanahan · 1 voice · 8 citations
Arts and Humanities · Social Sciences · #Digital Games and Media #Gothic Literature and Media Analysis #Religious Studies and Spiritual Practices

paper · doi:10.1080/0020174x.2024.2434860

openalex publication_date 2024/12/01 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/30

Abstract

The advent of conversational agents with increasingly human-like behaviour throws old philosophical questions into new light. Does it, or could it, ever make sense to speak of AI agents built out of generative language models in terms of consciousness, given that they are ‘mere’ simulacra of human behaviour, and that what they do can be seen as ‘merely’ role play? Drawing on the later writings of Wittgenstein, this paper attempts to tackle this question while avoiding the pitfalls of dualistic thinking.

Citations

• On the Dangers of Stochastic Parrots
• Robot Rights? Let's Talk about Human Welfare Instead
• Talking about Large Language Models
• What Is It Like to Be a Bat?
• Emergent Abilities of Large Language Models
• PaLM-E: An Embodied Multimodal Language Model
• The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life
• Consciousness in Artificial Intelligence: Insights from the Science of Consciousness
• Theories of consciousness and a life worth living
• Role play with large language models
• Generative agent-based modeling with actions grounded in physical, social, or digital space using Concordia

Cited by

• Does It Make Sense to Speak of Introspection in Large Language Models?
• Palatable Conceptions of Disembodied Being: Terra Incognita in the Space of Possible Minds
• Automatic Minds: Cognitive Parallels Between Hypnotic States and Large Language Model Processing
• On the creativity of large language models
• Heads or Tails: A Simple Example of Causal Abstractive Simulation
• The Xeno Sutra: Can Meaning and Value be Ascribed to an AI-Generated "Sacred" Text?
• Narrative coherence in neural language models. [europepmc]
• Large language models as cognitive shortcuts: a systems-theoretic reframing beyond bullshit. [europepmc]
• Attribution of consciousness to non-human animals: insights from AI and multidimensional frameworks. [europepmc]

Discussions

• Consciousness is a distinct concept, a particularly tricky, multi-faceted concept that merits its own careful treatment. Some of my own thoughts here: www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.... and here: arx [bsky, 5 points, 0 comments]

Related

• Simulacra as Conscious Exotica
• Artificial Consciousness: Science Fiction, Utopia, or Pandora's Box?
• Perfect AI Mimicry and the Epistemology of Consciousness: A Solipsistic Dilemma
• On the Very Idea of a (Synthetic) Conceptual Scheme
• Towards the Artificial Brain: A Base Framework for Modelling Consciousness and Unconsciousness