Related papers: Preliminaries to artificial consciousness: a multi…
Finding general principles underlying brain function has been appealing to scientists. Indeed, in some branches of science like physics and chemistry (and to some degree biology) a general theory often can capture the essence of a wide…
Recent work on artificial consciousness shifts evaluation from behaviour to internal architecture, deriving indicators from theories of consciousness and updating credences accordingly. This is progress beyond naive Turing-style tests. But…
Insofar as consciousness has a functional role in facilitating learning and behavioral control, the builders of autonomous AI systems are likely to attempt to incorporate it into their designs. The extensive literature on the ethics of AI…
A new prior is proposed for learning representations of high-level concepts of the kind we manipulate with language. This prior can be combined with other priors in order to help disentangling abstract factors from each other. It is…
This paper is a shortened version of the full paper that was published in the journal Frontiers of Psychology in May 2022. In recent decades, the scientific study of consciousness has significantly increased our understanding of this…
Artificial agents now generate behavior rich enough to invite trust, surprise, and concern, yet our evaluation tools still privilege capability scores over psychological structure. This paper argues that the philosophical impasse between…
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…
We look at consciousness through the lens of Theoretical Computer Science, a branch of mathematics that studies computation under resource limitations, distinguishing functions that are efficiently computable from those that are not. From…
The field of artificial intelligence (AI) represents an enormous endeavour of humankind that is currently transforming our societies down to their very foundations. Its task, building truly intelligent systems, is underpinned by a vast…
High-dimensional data and high-dimensional representations of reality are inherent features of modern Artificial Intelligence systems and applications of machine learning. The well-known phenomenon of the "curse of dimensionality" states:…
Whether current or near-term AI systems could be conscious is a topic of scientific interest and increasing public concern. This report argues for, and exemplifies, a rigorous and empirically grounded approach to AI consciousness: assessing…
Panpsychism is a solution to the mind-body problem that presumes that consciousness is a fundamental aspect of reality instead of a product or consequence of physical processes (i.e., brain activity). Panpsychism is an elegant solution to…
Solutions relying on artificial intelligence are devised to predict data patterns and answer questions that are clearly defined, involve an enumerable set of solutions, clear rules, and inherently binary decision mechanisms. Yet, as they…
Recent advances in artificial intelligence (AI) have achieved human-scale speed and accuracy for classification tasks. In turn, these capabilities have made AI a viable replacement for many human activities that at their core involve…
Recent breakthroughs in artificial intelligence (AI) have brought about increasingly capable systems that demonstrate remarkable abilities in reasoning, language understanding, and problem-solving. These advancements have prompted a renewed…
This work seeks to study the beneficial properties that an autonomous agent can obtain by implementing a cognitive architecture similar to the one of conscious beings. Along this document, a conscious model of autonomous agent based in a…
Technological advances have dramatically expanded our ability to probe multi-neuronal dynamics and connectivity in the brain. However, our ability to extract a simple conceptual understanding from complex data is increasingly hampered by…
Cognitive imagination is a type of imagination that plays a key role in human thinking. It is not a ``picture-in-the-head'' imagination. It is a faculty to mentally visualize coherent and holistic systems of concepts and causal links that…
Objectively verifying the generative mechanism of consciousness is extremely difficult because of its subjective nature. As long as theories of consciousness focus solely on its generative mechanism, developing a theory remains challenging.…
If we take the subjective character of consciousness seriously, consciousness becomes a matter of "being" rather than "doing". Because "doing" can be dissociated from "being", functional criteria alone are insufficient to decide whether a…