Alien, Own and Not-Your-Own-and-Not-Alien Mental Life. A.I. Vvedensky’s Law and the Language of Intellect

Abstract

The problem of intersubjectivity is considered in the article in connection with the problems of artificial intelligence’s (AI) functioning. Recognition of the exis­tence of other’s and one’s own mental life is considered as an implicit prerequi­site of intersubjectivity. The collision between creative successes in the field of AI and the anonymity of communication with a new type of subject with an intellectual resource that exceeds human capabilities is noted. In the aspect of the problem of difference and similarity of AI with human intellect and lan­guage the thesis (law) of the Russian philosopher A.I. Vvedensky about the ab­sence of objective signs of other people’s mental life is actualized. The Kan­tian origins of this thesis and the postulate of moral feeling, which, according to Vvedensky, certifies this recognition, are considered. In this connection, the meaning of the term “metaphysical” in Vvedensky and Husserl is compared. Two aspects stand out in Vvedensky’s thought experiment: first, the refutation of the possibility of recognizing another’s mental life by means of analogy;
second, the interpretation of intelligent speech as a physical-physiological process. To the question of whether a machine thinks and whether a machine speaks, the author gives three different answers depending on the premises of the question. The author concludes that the specifics of machine intelligence and machine language, despite all the differences, do not exclude similarities with human intelligence and language possession, which are also to some extent inherently “machine-like”. The conclusion notes the similarity of the functioning of machine intelligence as data processing with Kant’s “cognitive capacity” and Husserl’s “transcendental subjectivity”, and a number of questions regarding the capabilities of machine and human intelligence are raised as well.