Artificial Consciousness as a Platform for Artificial General Intelligence
Ryota Kanai, Ippei Fujisawa, Shinya Tamai et al. preprint
Consciousness may have evolved as a platform for general intelligence—the ability to apply knowledge from past experiences to solve novel problems. The paper defines general intelligence and outlines three approaches to building AI systems that achieve it: simulation, combination, and generation. These correspond to proposed functions of consciousness from the information generation theory, global workspace theory, and a higher-order theory where qualia are meta-representations. The authors argue that consciousness integrates specialized generative models into a flexible complex, and that qualia allow an agent to choose which models to apply to new problems. These functions could be implemented as artificial consciousness, enabling systems to generate policies for novel problems with minimal trial and error.