Qualia have played a key role in the development of a science of consciousness. They brought into focus the question of whether explaining the availability of information for reasoning, verbal report, and the control of action would suffice to explain conscious experience. A science confined to access consciousness would have to justify that restriction and explain what became of the...
Key (2016) claims that fish do not feel pain because they lack the neural structures that have a contingent causal role in generating and feeling pain in mammals. I counterargue that no conclusive evidence supports the sufficiency of any mammalian neural structure to produce pain. We cannot move from contingent necessity in mammals to necessity in every organism.
In this paper I approach the problem of the boundaries and location of consciousness in a strictly physicalist way. I start with the debate on extended cognition, pointing to two unresolved issues: the ontological status of cognition and the fallacy of the center. I then propose using identity to single out the physical basis of consciousness. As a tentative solution, I consider Mind-Object...
The scope of the paper is to encourage scientists and engineering to avoid to do what Einstein pointed out as being the hallmark of folly. Machine consciousness scholars must be brave enough to step out of the beaten path. There must be some big recurrent conceptual mistakes that prevent science and technology from addressing machine consciousness.
Over the last three decades, the rise of embodied cognition (EC) articulated in various schools (or versions) of embodied, embedded, extended and enacted cognition (Gallagher’s 4E) has offered AI a way out of traditional computationalism—an approach (or an understanding) loosely referred to as embodied AI. This view has split into various branches ranging from a weak form on the brink of...
Here I present a mind-object identity theory based on a straightforward hypothesis: One's experience of an object is identical with the object itself. To defend this hypothesis, I will reconsider the notion of a physical object in terms of relative and actual properties. To address cases of misperception such as dreams and hallucinations, I will also reconsider the notion of present in relative...
Recently, there has been considerable interest and effort to the possibility to design and implement conscious robots, i.e., the chance that robots may have subjective experiences. Typical approaches as the global workspace, information integration, enaction, cognitive mechanisms, embodiment, i.e., the Good Old-Fashioned Artificial Consciousness, henceforth, GOFAC, share the same conceptual...
What is the conscious mind? What is experience? In 1968, David Armstrong asked “What is a man?” and replied that a man is “a certain sort of material object”. This book starts from his question but proceeds along a different path. The traditional mind-brain identity theory is set aside, and a mind-object identity theory is proposed in its place: to be conscious of an object is simply to be made...
Traditional mind-body identity theories maintain that consciousness is identical with neural activity. Consider an alternative identity theory – namely, a mind-object identity theory of consciousness (OBJECTBOUND). I suggest to take into consideration whether one’s consciousness might be identical with the external object. The hypothesis is that, when I perceive a yellow banana, the thing that...
Sooner or later, machine consciousness will have to address the elusive notion of free will either to dismiss it or to produce a machine implementation. It is unclear whether freedom and consciousness are independent aspects of the human mind or by-product of the same underlying structure. Here, the relevant literature is reviewed focusing on the connection between determinism and...
Artificial consciousness is still far from being an established discipline. We will try to outline some theoretical assumption that could help in dealing with phenomenal consciousness. What are the technological and theoretical obstacles that face the enthusiast scholars of artificial consciousness? After presenting an outline of the state of artificial consciousness, we will focus on the...