Artificial intelligence and subjective experience

Abstract

Artificial Intelligence (AI) is the scientific study of occurrent and dispositional mentation with a view to providing adequate computational models of the mind. As a science, AI is committed to an objective, third-person verifiable account of reality. If, however, there are aspects of our mentation that are irreducibly non-physical and subjective, then those aspects are forever closed to any computational model of the mind; and AI is in principle doomed. This, to my mind, is the most serious objection to AI. In this essay, I consider the objection and suggest how to respond to it.