THE POTENTIAL FOR CONSCIOUSNESS OF ARTIFICIAL SYSTEMS

The question about the potential for consciousness of artificial systems has often been addressed using thought experiments, which are often problematic in the philosophy of mind. A more promising approach is to use real experiments to gather data about the correlates of consciousness in humans, and develop this data into theories that make predictions about human and artificial consciousness. A key issue with an experimental approach is that consciousness can only be measured using behavior, which places fundamental limits on our ability to identify the correlates of consciousness. This paper formalizes these limits as a distinction between type I and type II potential correlates of consciousness (PCCs). Since it is not possible to decide empirically whether type I PCCs are necessary for consciousness, it is indeterminable whether a machine that lacks neurons or hemoglobin, for example, is potentially conscious. A number of responses have been put forward to this problem, including suspension of judgment, liberal and conservative attribution of the potential for consciousness and a psychometric scale that models our judgment about the relationship between type I PCCs and consciousness.

[1]  David Hume.  A Treatise of Human Nature: Being an Attempt to introduce the experimental Method of Reasoning into Moral Subjects , 1972 .

[2]  Eric Dietrich,et al.  Let's Dance! The Equivocation in Chalmers' Dancing Qualia Argument , 2004, Minds and Machines.

[3]  Alana T. Wong,et al.  Age-Related Changes in the Episodic Simulation of Future Events , 2008, Psychological science.

[4]  G. Edelman,et al.  Consciousness : how matter becomes imagination , 2001 .

[5]  John R. Searle,et al.  Minds, brains, and programs , 1980, Behavioral and Brain Sciences.

[6]  S. Zeki,et al.  The disunity of consciousness , 2003, Trends in Cognitive Sciences.

[7]  N. Block.  Troubles with functionalism , 1993 .

[8]  Christof Koch,et al.  The Neural Correlates of Consciousness , 2007, Scholarpedia.

[9]  Kathleen V. Wilkes,et al.  Real People: Personal Identity without Thought Experiments , 1988 .

[10]  A. Seth.  THE STRENGTH OF WEAK ARTIFICIAL CONSCIOUSNESS , 2009 .

[11]  S. Dehaene,et al.  Towards a cognitive neuroscience of consciousness: basic evidence and a workspace framework , 2001, Cognition.

[12]  W. Singer.  Phenomenal Awareness and Consciousness from a Neurobiological Perspective , 2007 .

[13]  Stevan Harnad.  Levels of Functional Equivalence in Reverse Bioengineering: The Darwinian Turing Test for Artificial Life , 1994 .

[14]  T. Kuhn,et al.  The Essential Tension , 1977 .

[15]  D. Chalmers.  The Conscious Mind , 1996 .

[16]  Giulio Tononi,et al.  Integrated Information in Discrete Dynamical Systems: Motivation and Theoretical Framework , 2008, PLoS Comput. Biol..

[17]  F. Crick.  An Envisioning of Consciousness. (Book Reviews: The Astonishing Hypothesis. The Scientific Search for the Soul.) , 1994 .

[18]  Kerstin Dautenhahn,et al.  Socially intelligent robots: dimensions of human–robot interaction , 2007, Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences.

[19]  D. Chalmers,et al.  On the Search for the Neural Correlate of Consciousness , 1996 .

[20]  Sung-Bae Cho,et al.  A Neural Global Workspace Model for Conscious Attention , 1997, Neural Networks.