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...
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...
During binocular rivalry, visual perception alternates spontaneously between two different monocular images. Such perceptual reversals are slowed or halted if stimuli are presented intermittently with inter-stimulus intervals larger than ~400 ms--a phenomenon called stabilization. Often, the neural correlates of reversal and stabilization are studied separately, and both phenomena in turn are...
There has been considerable interest recently in using multivariate decoding techniques applied to functional MRI signals in order to decode the contents of a person’s consciousness. The use of such signals has inherent disadvantages due to the delay of the hemodynamic response. Moreover to date it has not been shown possible to generalize the decoding of brain signals from one individual to...
Summary Visual neuroscience has long sought to determine the extent to which stimulus-evoked activity in visual cortex depends on attention and awareness. Some influential theories of consciousness maintain that the allocation of attention is restricted to conscious representations [1, 2]. However, in the load theory of attention [3], competition between task-relevant and task-irrelevant...