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...
Under the influence of psychedelics, people often report encountering "entities" who seem to have their own autonomous agency. Depending on the cultural milieu, these entities are reported to take a variety of forms, including spirits, elves, ancestors, or fragments of the self. Encounters with such beings hold a central place in many traditions of psychedelic practice around the world. And...
Conscious states-state that there is something it is like to be in-seem both rich or full of detail and ineffable or hard to fully describe or recall. The problem of ineffability, in particular, is a longstanding issue in philosophy that partly motivates the explanatory gap: the belief that consciousness cannot be reduced to underlying physical processes. Here, we provide an information...
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...
Predictive processing approaches to brain function are increasingly delivering promise for illuminating the computational underpinnings of a wide range of phenomenological states. It remains unclear, however, whether predictive processing is equipped to accommodate a theory of consciousness itself. Furthermore, objectors have argued that without specification of the core computational...
The Predictive Processing (PP) framework casts the brain as a probabilistic prediction engine that continually generates predictions of the causal structure of the world in order to construct for itself, from the top down, incoming sensory signals. Conceiving of the brain in this way has yielded incredible explanatory power, offering what many believe to be our first glimpse at a unified theory...
Psychedelic drugs such as psilocybin, LSD and DMT are known to induce powerful alterations in phenomenology. Perhaps of most philosophical and scientific interest is their capacity to disrupt and even “dissolve” one of the most primary features of normal experience: that of being a self. Such “peak” or “mystical” experiences are of increasing interest for their potentially transformative...
Disruptions in the ordinary sense of selfhood underpin both pathological and "enlightened" states of consciousness. People suffering from depersonalization can experience the loss of a sense of self as devastating, often accompanied by intense feelings of alienation, fear, and hopelessness. However, for meditative contemplatives from various traditions, "selfless" experiences are highly sought...
This paper introduces the notion of adaptive narrative control, a conception of how subpersonal computational processes shape the contents of conscious experience to realize adaptive behavior. We unpack the implications of the theory for understanding the computational mechanisms underwriting psychopathology and improvements in subjective well-being associated with psychedelic therapy and...
Minimal phenomenal experience (MPE) is characterized as a state of pure awareness stripped of conceptual content, and serves as a methodological tool for probing the mechanisms underlying consciousness. We propose a computational architecture in which a policy model that generates behavior is recursively coupled to a program model that synthesizes structured, executable explanations of that...
Minimal Phenomenal Experience (MPE) refers to the simplest form of conscious experience, characterized by the absence of time, self, and sensory content, where only pure awareness or consciousness remains. In this paper, we present a computational neurophenomenological account of minimal phenomenal experience within the active inference framework. We propose a generative mechanism that allows...