Related papers: A Mind Cannot Be Smeared Across Time
Machine consciousness evaluations mostly see behavior. For language model agents that behavior is language and tool use. That lets an agent say the right things about itself even when the constraints that should make those statements matter…
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…
Developments in machine learning and computing power suggest that artificial general intelligence is within reach. This raises the question of artificial consciousness: if a computer were to be functionally equivalent to a human, being able…
Shared-memory concurrency is difficult to reason about because each thread executes under interference from other threads. At the same time, many correctness arguments for classic algorithms are epistemic: a thread enters a critical region…
Although the conscious state is considered an emergent property of the underlying brain activity and thus somehow resides on brain hardware, there is a non-univocal mapping between both. Given a neural hardware, multiple conscious patterns…
The Apperception Engine is an unsupervised learning system. Given a sequence of sensory inputs, it constructs a symbolic causal theory that both explains the sensory sequence and also satisfies a set of unity conditions. The unity…
The consciousness standing for artificial intelligence divides opinions across epistemological positions. Whether or not machines can be conscious, and whether we can ascertain the truth of such a proposition for any given case, has…
The problem of consciousness faced several challenges for a few reasons: (a) a lack of necessary and sufficient conditions, without which we would not know how close we are to the solution, (b) a lack of a synthesis framework to build…
The science of consciousness has made great strides by focusing on the behavioral and neuronal correlates of experience. However, correlates are not enough if we are to understand even basic neurological fact; nor are they of much help in…
Quantum theory reflects within itself a separation of evidence from explanations. This separation leads to a known proof that: (1) no wave function can be determined uniquely by evidence, and (2) any chosen wave function requires a guess…
Time flows, or at least the time of our experience does. Can we provide an objective account of why experience, confined to the short window of the conscious present, encompasses a succession of moments that slip away from now to then--an…
Music can be represented in multiple forms, such as in the audio form as a recording of a performance, in the symbolic form as a computer readable score, or in the image form as a scan of the sheet music. Music synchronisation provides a…
While questions of a functional localization of consciousness in the brain have been the subject of myriad studies, the idea of a temporal access code as a specific brain mechanism for consciousness has remained a neglected possibility.…
We approach the question "What is Consciousness?" in a new way, not as Descartes' "systematic doubt", but as how organisms find their way in their world. Finding one's way involves finding possible uses of features of the world that might…
We currently see a steady rise in the usage and size of multiprocessor systems, and so the community is evermore interested in developing fast parallel processing algorithms. However, most algorithms require a synchronization mechanism,…
Here we show that for coupled-map systems, the length of the transient prior to synchronization is both dependant on the coupling strength and dynamics of connections: systems with fixed connections and with no self-coupling display…
The Machine Consciousness Hypothesis states that consciousness is a substrate-free functional property of computational systems capable of second-order perception. I propose a research program to investigate this idea in silico by studying…
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…
Monotonicity in concurrent systems stipulates that, in any global state, extant system actions remain executable when new processes are added to the state. This concept is not only natural and common in multi-threaded software, but also…
Cognition is not passive data accumulation but the active resolution of uncertainty through symmetry breaking. This paper argues that both cognitive evolution and development unfold via sequential symmetry-breaking transitions that disrupt…