The Integral Problematicity of Internal Experience: Self-Consciousness from Socrates to Artificial Intelligence?

Abstract

The essay moves from Enrico Berti’s Introduzione alla metafisica (1993) and in particular problematizes internal experience and its three aspects of universality, problematicity and foundationality. It first of all takes up Plato’s reading of them and the emergence of the
notion of self-consciousness or syneidènai heautôi as Socratic knowledge of not knowing. This is then compared with what emerged from the recent debate on Artificial Intelligence : human self-conciousness does not appear to be transferable to a computer precisely because of the
characteristics it displays and which make it the basis of every possible research, conducted not only on simple data but on the meanings of what is known.