In a vision-first story, conscious vision evolved before other kinds of conscious experience. This can be contrasted with an olfaction-first story, in which conscious vision co-opted integrative mechanisms that first evolved for modeling the causes of olfactory stimuli. An olfaction-first story makes good sense of the connection between consciousness and holistic integration across temporal...
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...
Abstract Seth’s case for biological naturalism rests on a worryingly speculative foundation: the free energy principle. Arguments for computational functionalism are likewise speculative. Yet I am optimistic that the clash can be resolved empirically. Alleged dependencies of consciousness markers on biological properties can be tested comparatively, and a pattern of failed predictions would...
How will society respond to the idea that artificial intelligence (AI) could be conscious? Drawing on lessons from perceptions of animal consciousness, we highlight psychological, social, and economic factors that shape perceptions of AI consciousness. These insights can inform emerging debates about AI moral status, ethical treatment, and future policy.
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...
There is growing interest in the relationship been AI and consciousness. Joseph LeDoux and Jonathan Birch thought it would be a good moment to put some of the big questions in this area to some leading experts. The challenge of addressing the questions they raised was taken up by Kristin Andrews, Nicky Clayton, Nathaniel Daw, Chris Frith, Hakwan Lau, Megan Peters, Susan Schneider, Anil Seth,...
A conscious being has a subjective point of view on the world and on its own body. This idea of a ‘point of view’ is easiest to grasp in the case of vision. Ernst Mach, in the Analysis of Sensations, famously attempted to draw his own visual point of view (Figure 1). But there is far more to human subjective experience than vision. Our subjective point of view includes sounds, odours, tastes,...
We consider the relationship between neural and behavioural evidence for animal consciousness. We critically examine two recent studies: one neural and one behavioural. The first, on crows, finds different neural activity depending on whether a stimulus is reported as seen or unseen. However, to implicate this neural activity in consciousness, we must assume that a specific conditioned...
'Sentience' sometimes refers to the capacity for any type of subjective experience, and sometimes to the capacity to have subjective experiences with a positive or negative valence, such as pain or pleasure. We review recent controversies regarding sentience in fish and invertebrates and consider the deep methodological challenge posed by these cases. We then present two ways of responding to...
There is no agreement on whether any invertebrates are conscious and no agreement on a methodology that could settle the issue. How can the debate move forward? I distinguish three broad types of approach: theory-heavy, theory-neutral and theory-light. Theory-heavy and theory-neutral approaches face serious problems, motivating a middle path: the theory-light approach. At the core of the...
Peter Godfrey-Smith's Metazoa and Joseph LeDoux's The Deep History of Ourselves present radically different big pictures regarding the nature, evolution and distribution of consciousness in animals. In this essay review, I discuss the motivations behind these big pictures and try to steer a course between them.
Over the past two decades, Ginsburg and Jablonka have developed a novel approach to studying the evolutionary origins of consciousness: the Unlimited Associative Learning (UAL) framework. The central idea is that there is a distinctive type of learning that can serve as a transition marker for the evolutionary transition from non-conscious to conscious life. The goal of this paper is to...
How does consciousness vary across the animal kingdom? Are some animals 'more conscious' than others? This article presents a multidimensional framework for understanding interspecies variation in states of consciousness. The framework distinguishes five key dimensions of variation: perceptual richness, evaluative richness, integration at a time, integration across time, and self-consciousness....
Peter Carruthers has recently argued for a surprising conditional: if a global workspace theory of phenomenal consciousness is both correct and fully reductive, then there are no substantive facts to discover about phenomenal consciousness in nonhuman animals. I present two problems for this conditional. First, it rests on an odd double-standard about the ordinary concept of phenomenal...
Background Female chronic pelvic pain (CPP) is defined as intermittent or constant pelvic or lower abdominal pain occurring in a woman for at least 6 months. Up to a quarter of women are estimated to be affected by CPP worldwide and it is responsible for one fifth of specialist gynecological referrals in the United Kingdom. Psychological interventions are commonly utilized. As waiting times and...