I review three problems that have historically motivated pessimism about artificial intelligence: (1) the problem of consciousness, according to which artificial systems lack the conscious oversight that characterizes intelligent agents; (2) the problem of global relevance, according to which artificial systems cannot solve fully general theoretical and practical problems; (3) the problem of...
ABSTRACT Constitutive panpsychism is the doctrine that macro-level consciousness—that is, consciousness of the sort possessed by certain composite things such as humans—is built out of irreducibly mental (or proto-mental) features had by some or all of the basic physical constituents of reality. On constitutive panpsychism, changes in macro-level consciousness amount to changes in either the...
The Collaboration Problem is the problem of accounting for how a bundle of ultimate physical constituents (UPCs) can coordinate their causal efforts, so as to manifest their collective consciousness-generating power. The Threshold Problem is the problem of describing the types and degrees of complexity that a system has to exhibit in order for its constituent UPCs to jointly manifest their...