Does Machine Understanding Require Consciousness?
Frontiers in Systems Neuroscience May 18, 2022 R. Pepperell
Consciousness is essential to natural human understanding and may explain humans' superior performance in some cognitive tasks. While machine learning systems can match or exceed human performance in areas like natural language processing and image classification, their cognitive abilities may stem from spurious correlations rather than genuine understanding. Natural understanding in humans entails consciousness, a capacity that appears to account for the authenticity of semantic processing that characterizes natural understanding. The author proposes a hypothesis for why consciousness matters to understanding and suggests that progress toward machine understanding may benefit from modeling natural processes as closely as possible in mechanical substrates.