Selmer Bringsjord
Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute
Critic Current evidence and current methods do not support the claims being made
Selmer Bringsjord directs the Rensselaer AI and Reasoning (RAIR) Laboratory at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute and stands among the most rigorous skeptics in the machine consciousness debate. His argument, developed across books and papers on logicist AI, is that neither behavioral evidence nor Turing-style tests can settle whether a machine is conscious, because behavior underdetermines the underlying states, and that the field’s optimistic claims rest on informal intuitions rather than formal criteria. His position is not substance dualism. It is a demand for proof standards, and he has argued that no current framework for machine consciousness meets them.
The critical position bears on this site’s measurement discipline. The indicator-property movement this site tracks in the nineteen researcher checklist answers Bringsjord’s challenge in its own way, by replacing behavioral tests with architectural assessment against scientific theories. Whether that movement succeeds is partly a bet that Bringsjord is wrong about how much formal rigor is achievable.
His role in the site’s database is the disciplined opposition. Where the cellular consciousness camp argues that machines lack the right material, Bringsjord argues that nobody, including his own field, has yet stated the criteria precisely enough for the question to be settled either way.
Known for. Logicist AI and consciousness, skepticism about behavioral tests for machine minds, the RAIR Lab, formal arguments against superintelligence claims
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- Patricia S. ChurchlandDepartment of Philosophy, University of California, San DiegoFounding of Neurophilosophy (1986), Eliminative Materialism, Braintrust: What Neuroscience Tells Us about Morality (2011), co-evolution of philosophy and neuroscience
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Selmer Bringsjord is listed with the other critics and skeptics, who hold that current evidence and current methods do not support the claims being made. The positions themselves are set out in the index of consciousness theories. Every researcher covered on this site is indexed in the directory of consciousness researchers.