Tahua O'Leary

This paper addresses the question of the relationship between happiness and things (by which I mean the small objects that populate our everyday lives). I draw on Beckett, who formulated the question ‘what is the correct attitude to adopt towards things?’, and many of whose characters have a heightened sense of both the importance and the disposability of things. I bring Beckett into conversation with one of the core texts of Chinese Daoism – the Zhuangzi – in which things are approached as requiring a particular attitude, which one could characterize as a very ‘light touch’. My aim is to show what, in our world of escalating consumption, can be learned from this modern Western, and this ancient Chinese, reflection on things and their relation to happiness

The established theories and frameworks on consciousness in the academic literature as related to artificial intelligence (AI), are rooted in anthropocentricism. Even those theories created intentionally for AI are based on the levels of consciousness as it is understood in humans primarily, and in other animals secondarily. This paper will discuss why such anthropocentric frameworks are built on unsecure foundations. We will do this by comparing the capacities and functions of human and AI cognitive architectures, discussing the ramifications and consequences of the behaviors that stem from these, and looking at the neurological conditions in humans that can give the most promising hints as to what a potential conscious AI entity would look like. The paper ends with a proposed solution for building a nonanthropocentric foundation of cognition that could lead toward a truly AI-focused framework of consciousness.