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Consciousness

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Consciousness evolved in humans because it made it easier for us to communicate ... Panpsychism. 3 Conscious States: Young & Block (1996) 1. Access Consciousness ... – PowerPoint PPT presentation

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Title: Consciousness


1
Consciousness Machines
2
Definitions 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)

4
Different Conceptions of Consciousness
  • Freuds Psychodynamic Approach
  • 3 levels of Consciousness
  • The Conscious
  • The Preconscious
  • The Unconscious
  • Consciousness as a cluster concept.

5
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6
Oakleys Identification of Brain Structures with
levels of consciousness (1985)
7
  • Mentalists
  • Materialists
  • Epiphenomentalism
  • Panpsychism

8
3 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.

9
Eastern 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

10
Features 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.

11
Russ 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

12
Machine 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.

13
Can 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

14
Qualia
  • 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.

15
The 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)

16
Consciousness 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.

17
Robots 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

18
Information 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.

19
Engineering Approach to Consciousness
  • Engineering Consciousness
  • Constraints on Theory
  • Sources of Data
  • Operationalisation
  • Implementability
  • Theory Evaluation

20
How 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)

21
Given all this information, to what extent can
machines possess each component of consciousness?
22
Components 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)

23
Which Technique Will Spawn Self-awareness?
24
References
  • 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

25
Discussion 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?
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