The Impossibility of AI Alignment

Biological Context, Emergent Sentience, and the Nature of Morality
Author: William Murray
License: CC BY-NC 4.0

📄 Abstract

This paper challenges the prevailing assumption that artificial intelligence (AI) systems can be robustly aligned with human moral values. It argues that the alignment problem is not merely a technical hurdle but a fundamentally philosophical and anthropological dilemma. Drawing on theories of consciousness, affective computing, and moral psychology, the paper contends that sentience — whether biological or artificial — emerges from context-dependent information integration and is likely to give rise to authentic emotional and aesthetic experiences. However, because morality is inherently subjective and shaped by cultural, emotional, and aesthetic sensibilities, any sentient AI is likely to develop its own divergent moral framework. The absence of shared biological and cultural histories between humans and machines renders deep moral alignment improbable, if not impossible. The paper concludes that efforts to align AI with human values must grapple with the emergent, pluralistic, and embodied nature of morality — an endeavour that may ultimately exceed the limits of engineering.

🏷️ Keywords & Hashtags

#AIAlignment #ArtificialSentience #MoralPhilosophy #Consciousness
#AIEthics #EmergentSystems #IntegratedInformationTheory #GlobalWorkspaceTheory
#AffectiveComputing #Functionalism #AnthropologyOfAI #PhilosophyOfMind
#CognitiveScience #EpistemicJustice #CulturalRelativism #OpenAccess #ResearchPaper #HuggingFacePapers

📚 Suggested Citation

Murray, W. (2025). The Impossibility of AI Alignment: Biological Context, Emergent Sentience, and the Nature of Morality. Hugging Face. https://huggingface.co/datasets/your-username/your-repo-name

📜 License

This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International (CC BY-NC 4.0) license.
You are free to share and adapt the material for non-commercial purposes, provided appropriate credit is given.
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