A minimally autopoietic artificial intelligence (AI) system could be designed according to current engineering principles. Although Seth suggests that standard computational systems are not autopoietic and therefore not conscious, autopoiesis is a high-level, functional concept, and nothing appears to prevent autopoietic processes in a standard computational system. Autopoietic requirements do...
Rapid progress in artificial intelligence (AI) capabilities has drawn fresh attention to the prospect of consciousness in AI. There is an urgent need for rigorous methods to assess AI systems for consciousness, but significant uncertainty about relevant issues in consciousness science. We present a method for assessing AI systems for consciousness that involves exploring what follows from...
This is a skeptical overview of the literature on AI consciousness. We will soon create AI systems that are conscious according to some influential, mainstream theories of consciousness but are not conscious according to other influential, mainstream theories of consciousness. We will not be in a position to know which theories are correct and whether we are surrounded by AI systems as richly...
Could there be 7/8 of a conscious subject, or 1.34 conscious subjects, or an entity indeterminate between being one conscious subject and seventeen? Such possibilities might seem absurd or inconceivable, but our ordinary assumptions on this matter might be radically mistaken. Taking inspiration from Dennett, we argue that, on a wide range of naturalistic views of consciousness, the processes...
On broadly Copernican grounds, we are entitled to default assume that apparently behaviorally sophisticated extraterrestrial entities ("aliens") would be conscious. Otherwise, we humans would be inexplicably, implausibly lucky to have consciousness, while similarly behaviorally sophisticated entities elsewhere would be mere shells, devoid of consciousness. However, this Copernican default...
This article defends the existence of borderline consciousness. In borderline consciousness, conscious experience is neither determinately present nor determinately absent, but rather somewhere between. The argument in brief is this. In considering what types of systems are conscious, we face a quadrilemma. Either nothing is conscious, or everything is conscious, or there’s a sharp boundary...
Kammerer and Frankish (this issue) challenge us to expand our conception of introspection beyond neurotypical human cases. This article describes a possible 'ancillary mind' modelled on a system envisioned in Leckie's (2013) science fiction novel Ancillary Justice. The ancillary mind constitutes a borderline case between a communicating group of individuals and a single, spatially distributed...
Claims that an AI system "instantiates" a consciousness- or cognition-theoretic construct are often supported by a cheap correlate: aggregate dependence read as irreducible integration, ordinary shared-store efficiency read as global access, or a confidence-labelled signal read as metacognitive monitoring. Such inferences trade on a construct's appearance while omitting the property that...
Whether current or near-term AI systems could be conscious is a topic of scientific interest and increasing public concern. This report argues for, and exemplifies, a rigorous and empirically grounded approach to AI consciousness: assessing existing AI systems in detail, in light of our best-supported neuroscientific theories of consciousness. We survey several prominent scientific theories of...
Abstract: This chapter proposes four policies of ethical design of human-grade AI. Two of the policies are precautionary. Given substantial uncertainty both about ethical theory and about the conditions under which AI would have conscious experiences, the chapter argues that we should be cautious in our handling of cases where different moral theories or different theories of consciousness...