A central question in discussions about artificial consciousness is whether biological properties are necessary for consciousness. In this context, biological properties are often divided between two types: biological substrates as opposed to biological functions. In this paper, I argue that the prospects of convincingly ruling out consciousness in (conventional) AI by appealing to a biological...
There is much interest in investigating the evolution question: How did consciousness evolve? In this paper, we evaluate the role that evolutionary considerations can play in justifying (i.e., confirming or falsifying) hypotheses about the origin, nature, and function of consciousness. Specifically, we argue against what we call evolution-first approaches to consciousness, according to which...