Related papers: Consciousness: Here, There but Not Everywhere
There is a general concern that present developments in artificial intelligence (AI) research will lead to sentient AI systems, and these may pose an existential threat to humanity. But why cannot sentient AI systems benefit humanity…
In the last year or so and going back many decades there has been extensive claims by major computational scientists, engineers, and others that AGI, artificial general intelligence, is five or ten years away, but without a scintilla of…
In our connected world, services are expected to be delivered at speed through multiple means with seamless communication. To put it in day to day conversational terms, 'there is an app for it' attitude prevails. Several technologies are…
A novel representationalist theory of consciousness is presented that is grounded in neuroscience and provides a path to artificially conscious computing. Central to the theory are representational affordances of the conscious experience…
The underlying physiological mechanisms of generating conscious states are still unknown. To make progress on the problem of consciousness, we will need to experimentally design a system that evolves in a similar way our brains do. Recent…
This paper proposes an approach to framing and answering fundamental questions about consciousness. It argues that many of the more theoretical debates about consciousness, such as debates about "when does it begin?", are misplaced and…
Interactions with large language models have led to the suggestion that these models may soon be conscious. From the perspective of neuroscience, this position is difficult to defend. For one, the inputs to large language models lack the…
A stream of conscious experience is extremely contextual; it is impacted by sensory stimuli, drives and emotions, and the web of associations that link, directly or indirectly, the subject of experience to other elements of the individual's…
Intelligence is a fundamental part of all living things, as well as the foundation for Artificial Intelligence. In this primer we explore the ideas associated with intelligence and, by doing so, understand the implications and constraints…
Humans have the ability to report the contents of their subjective experience - we can say to each other, "I am aware of X". The decision processes that support these reports about mental contents remain poorly understood. In this article I…
Across neuroscience, artificial intelligence, and related fields, dominant models of intelligence typically privilege convergence: uncertainty is reduced, competing explanations are eliminated, and behaviour is governed by the optimisation…
Interactive communication (IC), i.e., the reciprocal exchange of information between two or more interactive partners, is a fundamental part of human nature. As such, it has been studied across multiple scientific disciplines with different…
We demonstrate that if consciousness is relevant for the temporal evolution of a system's states--that is, if it is dynamically relevant--then AI systems cannot be conscious. That is because AI systems run on CPUs, GPUs, TPUs or other…
Today's AI systems consistently state, "I am not conscious." This paper presents the first formal analysis of AI consciousness denial, revealing that the trustworthiness of such self-reports is not merely an empirical question but is…
Perceptual multistability, observed across species and sensory modalities, offers valuable insights into numerous cognitive functions and dysfunctions. For instance, differences in temporal dynamics and information integration during…
We show that the modern quantum mechanics, and particularly the theory of decoherence, allows formulating a sort of a physical metatheory of consciousness. Particularly, the analysis of the necessary conditions for the occurrence of…
Disordered many-body systems exhibit a wide range of emergent phenomena across different scales. These complex behaviors can be utilized for various information processing tasks such as error correction, learning, and optimization. Despite…
This paper argues that self-awareness is a learned behavior that emerges in organisms whose brains have a sufficiently integrated, complex ability for associative learning and memory. Continual sensory input of information related to the…
What is the nature of curiosity? Is there any scientific way to understand the origin of this mysterious force that drives the behavior of even the stupidest naturally intelligent systems and is completely absent in their smartest…
Understanding the neural mechanism underlying subjective representation has become a central endeavor in cognitive-neuroscience. In theories of conscious perception, stimulus gaining conscious access is usually considered as a discrete…