Artificial systems increasingly behave in ways that resemble humans. But is that sufficient to make us see them as conscious, or as having related mental states? We contrast two broad possibilities. People may rely on a single general principle: the more appropriately an agent responds to its environment, the more conscious it is, whether human or artificial. We call this a functionalist...
Recent debates on artificial intelligence increasingly emphasise questions of AI consciousness and moral status, yet there remains little agreement on how such properties should be evaluated. In this paper, we argue that awareness offers a more productive and methodologically tractable alternative. We introduce a practical method for evaluating awareness across diverse systems, where awareness...
Creating artificial general intelligence is the solution most often in the spotlight. It is also linked with the possibility—or fear—of machines gaining consciousness. Alternatively, developing domain‐specific artificial intelligence is more reliable, energy‐efficient, and ethically tractable, and raises mostly a problem of effective coordination between different systems and humans. Herein, it...
widespread neural interactions. Yet the complex interdependencies between multisensory integration and perceptual awareness, or consciousness, remain to be defined. While perceptual awareness has traditionally been studied in a single sense, in recent years we have witnessed a surge of interest in the role of multisensory integration in perceptual awareness. Based on a recent IMRF symposium on...
Given that multiple senses are often stimulated at the same time, perceptual awareness is most likely to take place in multisensory situations. However, theories of awareness are based on studies and models established for a single sense (mostly vision). Here, we consider the methodological and theoretical challenges raised by taking a multisensory perspective on perceptual awareness. First, we...