Consciousness

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Consciousness Machines
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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

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• 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)

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Different Conceptions of Consciousness

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

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

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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.

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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

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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.

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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

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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.

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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

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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.

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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)

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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.

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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

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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.

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Engineering Approach to Consciousness

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

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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)

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

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Which Technique Will Spawn Self-awareness?
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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

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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?