Title: Consciousness
1Consciousness Machines
2Definitions of Consciousness
- Consciousness refers to those states of
sentience and awareness that typically begin when
we wake from a dreamless sleep and continue until
we go to sleep again, or fall into a coma, or
die, or otherwise become unconscious. - John R. Searle
3- Consciousness the higher level involves
self-awareness and self-reflection, whereas the
lower level involves a basic discrimination
between self and non-self. Reber (1993) - Consciousness evolved in humans because it made
it easier for us to communicate with others and
to develop social groups. - Humphrey (1993)
4Different Conceptions of Consciousness
- Freuds Psychodynamic Approach
- 3 levels of Consciousness
- The Conscious
- The Preconscious
- The Unconscious
- Consciousness as a cluster concept.
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6Oakleys Identification of Brain Structures with
levels of consciousness (1985)
7- Mentalists
- Materialists
- Epiphenomentalism
- Panpsychism
83 Conscious States Young Block (1996)
- 1. Access Consciousness
- - Refers to cognitive states.
- 2. Monitoring Consciousness
- - Refers to monitoring self and sense of self.
-
- 3. Phenomenal Consciousness
- - Refers to phenomenal states.
9Eastern Buddhist views
- When the final layer of self-monitoring is
dispensed with all divisions between self and
other object and subject even between one
moment and another vanish. What remains is a
holistic, mindful, fundament Pure Consciousness
10Features of Conscious Experience (Valentine 1992)
Functions of Consciousness (Shallice 1982)
- It is private.
- Combines information across different sensory
modalities. - Contains information about the results or
products of thought processes rather than the
processes themselves. - It is constantly changing like a river or stream.
- Used in decision making.
- Permits flexibility of behaviour.
- Used to control action.
- Used to monitor behaviour.
11Russ Hurlbert Descriptive Experience sampling
(DES)
- Inner Speech (32)
- Images (25)
- Unsymbolised Thought (25)
- Emotional Feelings (27)
- Sensations (25)
- Some thought processes contain two or more
categories hence more than 100
12Machine Consciousness Background
- Recent machine consciousness workshops in Memphis
(2002), Birmingham (2003), Turin (2003) and
Antwerp (2004) have made it clear that this is a
swiftly emerging field of international
presence. - A basic working assumption.
- Many things are that produced by or realised in
physical resources are non-physical in this sense
e.g. poverty, legal obligations, war etc. - One way to make progress in machine consciousness
is to complement research on physical and
physiological mechanisms by ignoring many of the
physical differences between systems and focus on
higher level, more abstract commonalities.
13Can A Machine be Conscious?
- Some experts think that the only way to ever
build conscious machines is to first understand
human or, more broadly, biological based
consciousness. - "Global Workspace Model" of Bernie Baars
constitutes a viable model for a conscious
system. - Workshop participants at the Cold Spring Harbor
Laboratory in 2001 came to a general consensus
that any conscious machine or artefact would need
to have a sense of self and purpose and an
ability to reason about itself (second-order
consciousness). - Other participants argued that none of such
functionalities, in and by themselves, would give
rise to subjective feelings. - The Turing Test
14Qualia
- Daniel Dennett identifies four properties which
are commonly ascribed to qualia that is, qualia
are - Ineffable
- Intrinsic
- Private
- Directly or immediately apprehensible in
consciousness. - Qualia include the ways things look, sound and
smell, the way it feels to have a pain, and more
generally, what it's like to have experiential
mental states. - If we include in the definition of qualia the
idea that the phenomenology of experience outruns
such intentional, functional and cognitive
analyses, then it is controversial whether there
are qualia.
15The Explanatory Gap
- How is it that anything so remarkable as a
state of consciousness comes about as a result of
irritating nervous tissue, is just as
unaccountable as the appearance of Djin (the
genie) when Aladdin rubbed his lamp - (T.H. Huxley 1866)
16Consciousness as a Biological Phenomena
- Variety of biological information-processing
architectures and the states and processes they
can support. - Biological changes, being based on molecular
structures, are inherently discontinuous. - Evolutionary changes.
17Robots With Internal Models A Route to Machine
Consciousness? Owen Holland and Rod Goodman
- The starting point that they chose is with the
conjunction of four fairly uncontroversial
observations - consciousness is known to arise from the
operation of the human brain - of all brains, the human brain has the highest
capacity for intelligence - the human brain evolved from simpler brains
- the human brain is a control system
- Two key design decisions
- To embody intelligence in a physical robot
- To concentrate on the exploitation of internal
models
18Information processing and ArchitectureAaron
Sloman Ron Chrisley
- What an organism or machine can do with
information depends on its architecture. An
architecture includes - Forms of representation
- Algorithms
- Concurrently active sub-systems
- Connections between and causal interactions
between sub-systems.
19Engineering Approach to Consciousness
- Engineering Consciousness
- Constraints on Theory
- Sources of Data
- Operationalisation
- Implementability
- Theory Evaluation
20How would we test consciousness?Lacombe (ESF)
- Posner attentional benefit task (Taylor)
- Priming, subception, deep discrimination (Booth)
- Seriality (Anceau)
- Operationalised tests (Chrisley)
- Generating meanings (Sanz)
- There can be no single test for consciousness
(Sloman) - Other minds (Chrisley)
21Given all this information, to what extent can
machines possess each component of consciousness?
22Components of Consciousness
- Machine
- (Pre-reflective) Self (Taylor, Salichs)
- Transparency (Haikkonen, Sanz)
- Planning (Salichs)
- Heterophenomenology (Chrisley, Sloman)
- Split of attentional signal in a way that
provides infallible self-identification (Taylor) - Centralised action selection (Redgrave)
- Control of attention (Anceau, Edmondson)
- Timing management (Anceau)
- Affect/Motivation (Sloman, Manzotti)
- Information processing architecture (Sloman)
- Uniqueness/non-duplicability (Manzotti)
- Qualia
- Human
- Self-awareness
- Emotion and affect
- Experience
- Phenomenal states
- Imagination
- Awareness
- Computational correlates (Cleeremans)
- Meta-representation
- Representational quality
- Strength
- Distinctiveness
- Stability
- Implicit Learning
- Learning (of dynamics) (Salichs)
- Meaning generation (Sanz, Haikonen)
- Control (Sanz, Holland, Sloman, Chrisley)
- Uniqueness/non-duplicability (Manzotti)
23Which Technique Will Spawn Self-awareness?
24References
- http//www.sussex.ac.uk/cogs/1-4-2-1.html
- http//www.theswartzfoundation.org/abstracts/2001_
summary.asp - http//aslab.disam.etsii.upm.es/public/events/moc/
- Psychology A students handbook Michael W.
Eysenck (2000) - http//www.artsci.wustl.edu/philos/MindDict/index
.html - http//www.cs.bham.ac.uk/research/cogaff/sloman-ch
risley-jcs03.pdf - http//www.nexusmagazine.com/articles/schumann.htm
- Carter Rita, (2002) Consciousness, Weidenfield
Nicholson - Young, A. and Block, N. (1996) Consciousness. In
V. Bruce, Unsolved Mysteries of the mind, LEA
Hove (UK). - http//bjp.rcpsych.org/cgi/content/full/181/2/91
25Discussion Questions
- If it were possible to create complete machine
conscious, would it be right to? - Could we control a conscious machine? Will robots
take over the world? - Would machine consciousness provoke addiction to
computers?