2025-05-02 22:00:19

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When 15-year-old Benjamin Qin Muji began writing his essay during the China trials for the International Philosophy Olympiad in Shanghai earlier this year, there was one question on his mind. “Do machines have the ability to think and feel pain?” Benjamin posed to his readers, the judges of the competition for high school students. Benjamin argued that artificial intelligence, with its remarkable ability to process multiple streams of information and synthesise new ideas, could indeed think and, therefore, was conscious. But AI could not feel pain because it lacked a biological body – the essential mediator of emotional experiences. The reasoning was so convincing that it vaulted Benjamin to top place among the more than 70 competitors in the trials. Next stop: the international stage. Benjamin is part of a new generation whose life will be dramatically affected by AI, as the world grapples with the legal implications of living alongside conscious machines and the evolving definition of what it means to be human in the age of advanced technology and AI . For him, the question of whether AI can be conscious is definitely important because it has very significant implications. “If AI is conscious, should we grant AI rights? Should they have personhood status?” he said. “We give animals rights, because we view them as sentient conscious beings. “If AI is conscious and we are not giving them adequate legal protections, they could be easily exploited,” he said while pointing to online jokes about being impolite to the AI chatbot ChatGPT. For now, regulations on artificial intelligence revolve around its governance, safety and risk. China was among the first countries to have introduced rules for AI, issuing a series of temporary measures since August 2023 that require service providers to submit security assessments and receive clearance before releasing mass-market AI products. Last year, the European Union became the first jurisdiction in the world to adopt a comprehensive legal framework to govern AI and mitigate risks. It bans the application of “unacceptable risks”, such as social scoring AI – classifying people based on a person’s behaviour, social status characteristics – and facial recognition in public spaces, while generative AI such as ChatGPT must comply with transparency requirements and copyright law. But this is just the beginning of new legal developments stemming from AI. Benjamin, a year 11 student at Harrow International School Hong Kong, said philosophers should move past simplistic, binary thinking of whether something was or was not conscious. Instead, he suggested measuring levels of consciousness on a spectrum, depending on a system’s ability to integrate flows of information. “This would be very useful as a possible system or model to consider in the future when thinking about comparing different kinds of AI and the different degrees of consciousness that they have.” Benjamin said the ubiquitous use of electronic devices in our thought processes was already challenging the definition of being human, and what counted as a part of our mind. He said an electronic device could be considered his extended mind because it recorded and stored information, and he could use it to think and work things out, just like his biological memory and mind would. We need to bring philosophy back to the community. It is not just a solitary endeavour in a room alone. Benjamin Qin Mujia “I would argue that there are parts of the physical world that are separate from a biological substance, but can still be considered part of our minds in some way,” he said. “This seems to suggest that humans are already like cyborgs in a way. We are already machinic beings, and the separation between humans and machines blurs. “This does have some ethical implications. For example, if you destroy someone’s iPad, they could argue you are destroying part of their mind, which is arguably a more serious offence. “How would a legal system work if you could claim that anything is part of your extended mind?” As technology evolves, today’s teenagers may encounter a future world shaped by rapid advancements in AI, automation and digital connectivity. Benjamin said that in his latest book – at 15 he has already written three and has plans to write more – he was exploring: “What does it mean to be a human in an age where machines also seem to have the ability to think? What qualifies as human?” Citing the German philosopher Immanuel Kant, who said space and time were pure intuitions of the mind, Benjamin said our concepts of space and time were like tinted glasses we put on to view the world. “They are the fundamental structures from which our consciousness begins.” “This would have implications for AI … While we occupy physical spaces, AI occupies digital spaces,” he said. As for time, humans experience the past, present and future, which “AI can almost simultaneously process”, he said. “[When] processing information, the AI already knows the output and the future. For example, if I try to do a bottle flip, the chances of me actually securing that are unpredictable – I don’t know if I’m going to land the bottle flip. “But with an AI, they can accurately predict and determine what is happening due to their existence in additional space, with their own accelerated experience of time,” he said, adding that more research on spatiality and temporality with AI was needed. When asked about the finite lifespan of humans compared to the enduring nature of machines, Benjamin said “our life only has meaning because it has an end. Everything we do is in anticipation of death,” citing German philosopher Martin Heidegger’s idea of “anticipatory resoluteness”, or humans existing in the state of “being-towards-death”. “But with AI, when there is not necessarily this final break, this final end, then the question really is where does that leave AI? How are they going to live if they are even able to have life in the same way that humans do? “AI’s possible experience of consciousness and life would be so fundamentally different to ours. But at the same time, we should not reject it. We should just appreciate the difference itself.” AI’s possible experience of consciousness and life would be so fundamentally different to ours. But at the same time, we should not reject it Benjamin Qin Mujia The International Philosophy Olympiad is a philosophical essay writing competition open to high school students from all countries. Students first take part in a national-level competition to qualify for the olympiad. Countries can then send up to two winning pupils to the worldwide competition. Last year, at the contest in Helsinki the gold medal winners were a student from China who wrote about why the AI is a prisoner dependent on human imperatives and a student from Germany who discussed darkness. At the trials in Shanghai in February, the adjudicators said Qin’s 3,300-word essay provided a philosophical framework for “what it means to be human” in an era of rapid technological advancement. Despite qualifying to attend the competition in Italy next month, he gave up his spot because the competition clashes with his final high school exams. Qin, who aspires to be a philosophy professor, is determined to enter and be selected again next year so he can represent Hong Kong (China). Defining conditions for thinking, Qin said “thinking is characterised by first abstracting information and then synthesising that information to produce something new”. “This idea went against a lot of philosophers who think thinking is something particular to the human mind, like [Greek philosopher] Aristotle who called humans ‘rational animals’. “I challenge this by arguing that thinking itself cannot be defined as unique to humans because there is nothing in the concept of thinking intrinsically that gives it some humanness.” Benjamin argued that machines could satisfy what qualified as thinking. He referred to the “global workspace theory”, an idea that consciousness, which he equated to thinking, is the ability to integrate different flows of information input. For example, he said, humans synthesised information from sight, touch and hearing to produce an image of the world we experience. “For global workspace theorists, a machine or AI would be able to think or be conscious if they are able to integrate different flows of information at the same time and have a meta-awareness of that. “If a machine is able to process multiple things simultaneously and be able to integrate these into some larger picture, that would suffice as thinking,” he said, pointing to some large language models found to potentially hold the ability of parallel processing of different inputs. As for pain, Benjamin said the requirement for anything to feel pain was both thinking and embodiment. While people could feel emotional pain, which does not necessarily involve the body, the body plays a role in mediating the experience of emotional pain. Citing gym training as an example, Benjamin said that while people went to the gym to build physical strength, they also nurtured emotional strength and resilience. “The body has a really profound effect on not just the body, but on how we view our entire self-identity. There is not really that large of a separation between the mind and body as philosophers in the past had argued. “The body, in a way, conditions the mind to be what it can be. Even when feeling emotional pain, the body still mediates our experience of that emotional pain and still conditions the way in which we feel that emotional pain. “Since machines – at least at the present moment – cannot have any kind of biological embodiments, I would argue that they cannot feel pain, at least in the same way that a human does.” Benjamin started publishing books on philosophy when he was 12. He is now working on a research paper investigating identity during sleep. “When we are asleep, do we have a sense of who we are? How does being asleep affect psychological identities?” he said. The project involves guidance from a philosophy lecturer in the United States and merges classic Hindu literature with neuroimaging research. Benjamin’s philosophical journey began at the age of 10 with A Little History of Philosophy by Nigel Warburton, a book his father gave him. The book features French philosopher René Descartes, best known for his “I think, therefore, I am” statement and his thought experiment of the “evil demon”. “How do we know if we are not dreaming? How do we know if everything we are experiencing is not simply a product of our imagination and something that is just this imaginary evil demon controlling us to believe everything we see and experience?” Benjamin asked. “For Descartes, his answer is that we can really never know and that everything we think we know can be doubted. “This is a really radical idea for me because I never thought about something like this. “What was even more interesting is how Descartes resolves this radical scepticism by arguing that simply by being able to doubt everything around us, we already presuppose the existence of the doubting subject – the doubter – and that it assumes that ‘I’ already exist. So I doubt, therefore I think, therefore I am.” A Little History of Philosophy also introduced him to the freedom of the world of philosophy. “I realised that philosophy was this one academic space where you have the freedom to express what you want to say. Even if you did not agree with what someone said, you could still find value in appreciating their arguments.” For Benjamin, philosophy went beyond its etymological meaning of “love of wisdom”. He resonates with French philosopher Gilles Deleuze’s definition of philosophy as the creation of concepts. “Philosophy is almost an artistic pursuit, because you are inventing new ways of thinking about the world, just as an artist would paint the world in a way that expresses certain characteristics that cannot really be seen just by observing it. “But at the same time, I think philosophy is just as logical as it is creative. It is a way of using logic and reason to arrive at conclusions that are poetic or artistic in some way.” Inspired by Slovenian philosopher Slavoj Žižek to apply philosophy to everyday life, Benjamin said he was setting up a non-profit called Somnus HK – based on the Latin word for sleep – with his friends with the aim of educating teenagers in Hong Kong about the importance of sleep. “We need to bring philosophy back to the community. It is not just a solitary endeavour in a room alone,” he said.