Can we share an us-feeling with a digital machine? Emotional sharing and the recognition of one as another^*

* Translated by John Crutchfield.

ABSTRACT

To share an us-feeling means to acknowledge one another. Can we share such a feeling with an extreme form of the other, for instance with a digital machine? The answer that is given in this article is ‘no’. Relevant tests like the Turing Test are based on a third-person perspective, whereas a second-person perspective would be needed.

KEYWORDS:

• Us-feeling
• Turing Test
• digital machines
• Leibniz’s Law
• acknowledgement
• social feelings
• third- and second-person perspective

Acknowledgements

For their valuable discussions and suggestions, the author wishes to thank the participants in the seminar of Prof. Dr Lutz Wingert at ETH Zürich, in the conference ‘Fascination with the Unknown: The Other’ in Leipzig, in the Philosophisches Kolloquium at the Universität Leipzig, and in the research colloquium ‘Philosophie, Psychiatrie, Psychosomatik’ at the Universität Heidelberg, as well as to Kristina Musholt and Eva Buddeberg for helpful comments on a previous version of this manuscript.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes on contributor

Eva-Maria Engelen is professor of Philosophy at the University of Konstanz and project director of the Kurt Gödel Research Center at the Berlin-Brandenburg Academy of Sciences and Humanities. Among her areas of research are philosophy of mind, philosophy of language and philosophy of emotions. She is editor-in-chief of Kurt Gödel’s Philosophical Remarks.

Notes

* Translated by John Crutchfield.

1 The test’s applicability to feelings, however, has been refuted by, among others, Peter Millican: ‘I have resisted any conflation between ‘intelligence’ and ‘consciousness’ […] [H]aving a mind is not so much the quality of its intellectual processing as its possession of an ‘inner life’ […] And nothing said above has given the slightest ground for supposing that an electronic computer […] is able to experience genuine feelings’ (Millican 2013, 594ff.)