This book is a skeptical overview of the literature on AI consciousness.
We will soon create AI systems that are conscious according to some influential, mainstream theories of consciousness but are not conscious according to other influential, mainstream theories of consciousness. We will not be in a position to know which theories are correct and whether we are surrounded by AI systems as richly and meaningfully conscious as human beings or instead only by systems as experientially blank as toasters. None of the standard arguments either for or against AI consciousness take us far.
Table of ContentsChapter One: Hills and Fog Chapter Two: What Is Consciousness? What Is AI? Chapter Three: Ten Possibly Essential Features of Consciousness Chapter Four: Against Introspective and Conceptual Arguments for Essential Features Chapter Five: Materialism and Functionalism Chapter Six: The Turing Test and the Chinese Room Chapter Seven: The Mimicry Argument Against AI Consciousness Chapter Eight: Global Workspace Theories and Higher Order Theories Chapter Nine: Integrated Information, Local Recurrence, Associative Learning, and Iterative Natural Kinds Chapter Ten: Does Biological Substrate Matter? Chapter Eleven: The Problem of Strange Intelligence Chapter Twelve: The Leapfrog Hypothesis and the Social Semi-Solution
Draft available here.
Per my usual custom, anyone who gives comments on the entire manuscript (by email please, to my academic address at ucr.edu) will receive not only the usual acknowledgement but an appreciatively signed copy once it appears in print.
7 comments:
From: Comments on "Ten Purportedly Essential Features of Consciousness : The Splintered Mind"...Arnold said: If we agree today-consciousness is learning about one's own being...then we can say we might find ourselves... emerging/balancing between introspection and extrospection...
I meant to ask above/about "Chapter Four: Against Introspective and Conceptual Arguments for Essential Features" ...the phrasing seems a contradiction, as introspection is from/for essence...could you just as well have said 'against extrospection...'
I must make time to peruse your draft, particularly Chapter Three. I like the scepticism there with the use of the modifier, *possible*. Best not to get one's toes chewed by pesky little, swarming fish, eh? I hope, by now, you know I am not a robot. Several blogs I visit are no longer sure, it seems. Thanks, Eric!
By-the-by, I have been thinking about reflective thinking (RT), espoused by someone I know little of. I can't know if RT is anything different to what I do KNOW. My brother is, may I say, sceptical. We grew up in troubled times. Hah! We thought we had it bad! Yeah.
It's becoming clear that with all the brain and consciousness theories out there, the proof will be in the pudding. By this I mean, can any particular theory be used to create a human adult level conscious machine. My bet is on the late Gerald Edelman's Extended Theory of Neuronal Group Selection. The lead group in robotics based on this theory is the Neurorobotics Lab at UC at Irvine. Dr. Edelman distinguished between primary consciousness, which came first in evolution, and that humans share with other conscious animals, and higher order consciousness, which came to only humans with the acquisition of language. A machine with only primary consciousness will probably have to come first.
What I find special about the TNGS is the Darwin series of automata created at the Neurosciences Institute by Dr. Edelman and his colleagues in the 1990's and 2000's. These machines perform in the real world, not in a restricted simulated world, and display convincing physical behavior indicative of higher psychological functions necessary for consciousness, such as perceptual categorization, memory, and learning. They are based on realistic models of the parts of the biological brain that the theory claims subserve these functions. The extended TNGS allows for the emergence of consciousness based only on further evolutionary development of the brain areas responsible for these functions, in a parsimonious way. No other research I've encountered is anywhere near as convincing.
I post because on almost every video and article about the brain and consciousness that I encounter, the attitude seems to be that we still know next to nothing about how the brain and consciousness work; that there's lots of data but no unifying theory. I believe the extended TNGS is that theory. My motivation is to keep that theory in front of the public. And obviously, I consider it the route to a truly conscious machine, primary and higher-order.
My advice to people who want to create a conscious machine is to seriously ground themselves in the extended TNGS and the Darwin automata first, and proceed from there, by applying to Jeff Krichmar's lab at UC Irvine, possibly. Dr. Edelman's roadmap to a conscious machine is at https://arxiv.org/abs/2105.10461, and here is a video of Jeff Krichmar talking about some of the Darwin automata, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J7Uh9phc1Ow
Thanks for sharing this. Edelman's approach is a contender. Arguably, IIT grew out of it, though they are distinct theories.
I don't know, Eric. Whether Edelman anticipated AI is arguable. I did not, and am not dead. Yet. Got sad news today. A good friend, Alan Combs, died. In April, this year. Combs was always "above his pay grade", but, way smarter than he was supposed to be. Anyway, he ,my brother and two others used to play chess in our backyard...I was, maybe, ten or twelve years old, and did not play chess. Later, I won one chess game with my brother.
I called them the four horsemen. Now, there is one.
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