Artificial Intelligence and Suppositum: A Critique of the Critique of the Notion of Selfhood

Abstract

The objective of this paper is to posit a critique of the contemporary critique of the notion of selfhood in the philosophy of mind and cognitive neuroscience. The research in artificial intelligence (AI) as the science of intelligence per se and/or of cognition, in general, has been considered and employed as a formidable theoretical tool in sustaining philosophical arguments for the denial of the existence of the Self or selfhood in the human person. It has revitalized the philosophical problematics of the existence or otherwise, of consciousness, intelligence, and autonomy not only in biological systems but also in non-biological systems; the possibility of non-biological life-kinds; and the deepening of the body-soul and/or brain-mind problem in the philosophy of mind. More so, the empirical evidence of the exceedingly complicated operations of intelligence and other cognitive actions in AI systems have strengthened the philosophical positions of materialist theories of the mind that, among other things, question the existence of the Self in the human person. This paper will give an exposition of the critique of selfhood in the human person, especially as expounded by Daniel Dennett. It will also posit a counter-critique of the critique of selfhood based on John Eccles’s dualistic-interactionalist philosophy of neuroscience and Karol Wojtyła’s philosophical anthropology based on the notion of suppositum. Hence, it shall defend the philosophical anthropology of the human person as a metaphysical suppositum possessing ontological subjectivity.