Related papers: The Consciousness Prior
The rapid evolution of artificial intelligence has led to expectations of transformative impact on science, yet current systems remain fundamentally limited in enabling genuine scientific discovery. This perspective contends that progress…
A cognitive architecture aimed at cumulative learning must provide the necessary information and control structures to allow agents to learn incrementally and autonomously from their experience. This involves managing an agent's goals as…
The ability of reasoning beyond data fitting is substantial to deep learning systems in order to make a leap forward towards artificial general intelligence. A lot of efforts have been made to model neural-based reasoning as an iterative…
The ability to understand and reason about cause and effect -- encompassing interventions, counterfactuals, and underlying mechanisms -- is a cornerstone of robust artificial intelligence. While deep learning excels at pattern recognition,…
We propose a principle for exploring context in machine learning models. Starting with a simple assumption that each observation may or may not depend on its context, a conditional probability distribution is decomposed into two parts:…
The science of consciousness has been successful over the last decades. Yet, it seems that some of the key questions remain unanswered. Perhaps, as a science of consciousness, we cannot move forward using the same theoretical commitments…
The most enigmatic aspect of consciousness is the fact that it is felt, as a subjective sensation. The theory proposed here aims to explain this particular aspect. The theory encompasses both the computation that is presumably involved and…
A singular attribute of humankind is our ability to undertake novel, cooperative behavior, or teamwork. This requires that we can communicate goals, plans, and ideas between the brains of individuals to create shared intentionality. Using…
This contribution examines two radically different explanations of our phenomenal intuitions, one reductive and one strongly non-reductive, and identifies two germane ideas that could benefit many other theories of consciousness. Firstly,…
Because we are highly motivated to be understood, we created public external representations -- mime, language, art -- to externalise our inner states. We argue that such external representations are a pre-condition for access…
The human brain is the substrate for human intelligence. By simulating the human brain, artificial intelligence builds computational models that have learning capabilities and perform intelligent tasks approaching the human level. Deep…
In the present work, quantum theory is founded on the framework of consciousness, in contrast to earlier suggestions that consciousness might be understood starting from quantum theory. The notion of streams of consciousness, usually…
This is a proof of the strong AI hypothesis, i.e. that machines can be conscious. It is a phenomenological proof that pattern-recognition and subjective consciousness are the same activity in different terms. Therefore, it proves that…
This overview of integrated information theory (IIT) emphasizes IIT's "consciousness-first" approach to what exists. Consciousness demonstrates to each of us that something exists--experience--and reveals its essential properties--the…
Large language models have been successful at tasks involving basic forms of in-context reasoning, such as generating coherent language, as well as storing vast amounts of knowledge. At the core of the Transformer architecture behind such…
Compositionality is believed to be fundamental to intelligence. In humans, it underlies the structure of thought, language, and higher-level reasoning. In AI, compositional representations can enable a powerful form of out-of-distribution…
It is proposed that both human creativity and human consciousness are (unintended) consequences of the human brain's extraordinary energy efficiency. The topics of creativity and consciousness are treated separately, though have a common…
Human cognition is punctuated by abrupt, spontaneous shifts between topics-driven by emotional, contextual, or associative cues-a phenomenon known as spontaneous thought in neuroscience. In contrast, self-attention based models depend on…
Conscious awareness refers to the association of information processing in the brain that is accompanied by subjective, reportable experiences. Current models of conscious access propose that sufficiently strong sensory stimuli ignite a…
Did natural consciousness and intelligent systems arise out of a path that was co-evolutionary to evolution? Can we explain human self-consciousness as having risen out of such an evolutionary path? If so how could it have been? In this…