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.”
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.
When the brain operates non-consciously it makes use of modules of the type seen in evolutionary biology. And it is true that many of our brain operations are indeed non-conscious. But conscious operations use additional neural pathways not used by non-conscious operations. And conscious operations are volitional and deliberate, i.e., use “coherent, thoughtful planning.” Consciousness uses a global neuronal workspace that “evolved to break the modularity and parallelism of unconscious computations” and which actively selects specific information upon which to act using a “greater capacity for multimodal convergence and integration.” Consciousness can also be of a second type, self monitoring,… Read more »
Once again this Sci-Hub location has been disabled due to proprietary pay-to-play bullshit. Here’s another location for a summary of the paper.http://www.pas.va/content/accademia/en/publications/scriptavaria/artificial_intelligence/dehaene.pdf
And here’s Dehaene in a YouTube video on the topic: https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=11&v=Rv7dgaqIG68
There is now a full copy of the article here: http://science.sciencemag.org/content/358/6362/486.full
[…] 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 […]