This past Monday, the existential questions club had a lively debate about two important topics: consciousness and free will. We opened the night talking about a famous philosophical argument called the Chinese Room argument, which talks about why computers may be unable to be conscious in the same way humans are conscious. This topic of consciousness evoked a number of interesting discussions, including about how to measure consciousness, whether animals and/or computers are currently conscious, and whether we would really want to create a conscious machine.Â
The heat of the discussion was intensified by one of our snacks for the evening, ghost pepper-flavored chips, which had the sneaky quality of initially seeming rather benign but packing quite a punch after a few moments. After our discussion of consciousness, we pivoted to the intended topic for the evening, free will.Â
We talked at length about how free will could or could not be possible in a world driven by physical interactions between particles. People proposed scientific and theological arguments on either side of the question of free will, and although we by no means reached a consensus on the question of free will, it seemed that our discussion was able to sharpen some of the intuitions people had in either direction. We closed off the evening with a very interesting video, shown by our PA Lincoln, of a play written by artificial intelligence and acted out by humans.