What is consciousness, and could machines have it?
Why is this work in the frame?
A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.
No Canadian affiliation. An affiliation-only frame — the usual design — would never have seen this work. It is one of the works that make the case for inverting the frame.
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.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
The record
- Venue
- Science
- Topic
- Neural dynamics and brain function
- Field
- Neuroscience
- Canadian institutions
- —
- Funders
- Air Force Office of Scientific ResearchEuropean Research CouncilCollège de FranceInstitut National de la Santé et de la Recherche MédicaleNational Institute of Neurological Disorders and StrokeCanadian Institute for Advanced ResearchCommissariat à l'Énergie Atomique et aux Énergies AlternativesAgence Nationale de la Recherche
- Keywords
- ConsciousnessUnconscious mindCertaintyComputationComputer scienceCognitive scienceNeural correlates of consciousnessInformation processingCognitive psychologyPsychologyCognitionArtificial intelligenceEpistemologyNeuroscienceAlgorithm
- Has abstract in OpenAlex
- yes