What is consciousness, and could machines have it?

What is consciousness, and could machines have it?

By Dehaene et al., Science 358, 486–492 (2017). The abstract:

“The controversial question of whether machines may ever be conscious must be based on a careful consideration of how consciousness arises in the only physical system that undoubtedly possesses it: the human brain. We suggest that the word “consciousness” conflates two different types of information-processing computations in the brain: the selection of information for global broadcasting, thus making it flexibly available for computation and report (C1, consciousness in the first sense), and the self-monitoring of those computations, leading to a subjective sense of certainty or error (C2, consciousness in the second sense). We argue that despite their recent successes, current machines are still mostly implementing computations that reflect unconscious processing (C0) in the human brain. We review the psychological and neural science of unconscious (C0) and conscious computations (C1 and C2) and outline how they may inspire novel machine architectures.”

0 0 votes
Article Rating
Subscribe
Notify of

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.

6 Comments
Oldest
Newest Most Voted
Inline Feedbacks
View all comments
M Harris

This is interesting. I checked the Albuquerque Public Library and found they have the paper and audio versions of Dehaene’s book, Consciousness and the Brain: Deciphering How the Brain Codes Our Thoughts. You can access the audio version with the hoopla app, which you download from the library website (https://abqlibrary.org/home) home page.

[…] Damasio‘s various forms of consciousness, from proto to core to narrative, as well as Dehaene‘s 2 forms. This Scientific American article reiterates at least the 2 different […]

6
0
Would love your thoughts, please comment.x
()
x