If an AI entity is conscious, it deserves moral status and to have its welfare protected. Just as society has granted certain animals moral status with legislation to protect their welfare because they have been deemed to be sentient, this paper shows that for any AI that can be confidently determined to be conscious, that AI deserves the same status and protection as sentient entities. This...
This study explores the potential for artificial agents to develop core consciousness, as proposed by Antonio Damasio's theory of consciousness. According to Damasio, the emergence of core consciousness relies on the integration of a self model, informed by representations of emotions and feelings, and a world model. We hypothesize that an artificial agent, trained via reinforcement learning...
Psychedelics, such as LSD and psilocybin, disrupt entrenched cognitive patterns by facilitating novel insights and new associations. This paper considers how AI can potentially mimic these psychedelic-induced cognitive disruptions to augment and enhance human creativity. Psychedelics likely enhance creativity by altering brain function, notably the activity of the Default Mode Network, which...
Current AI benchmarks often equate mimicry with genuine intelligence, emphasizing task performance over the underlying cognitive processes that enable human-like understanding. The Machine Perturbational Complexity & Agency Battery (mPCAB) introduces a new, substrate-independent framework that applies neurophysiological methods used initially to assess consciousness in artificial systems....
The paper brings together two different theoretical strands of research, one from cognitive science, the other from Science and Technology Studies. The purpose in so doing is to uncover how cognition interrelates with socio-material practices and AI technology. An integrative framework is presented as a possible way for connecting the two strands while theorizing on their interrelations with AI.
Human brain organoids, aka cerebral organoids or earlier "mini-brains", are 3D cellular models that recapitulate aspects of the developing human brain. They show tremendous promise for advancing our understanding of neurodevelopment and neurological disorders. However, the unprecedented ability to model human brain development and function in vitro also raises complex ethical, legal, and social...
The Free Energy Principle and Active Inference Framework (FEP-AI) begins with the understanding that persisting systems must regulate environmental exchanges and prevent entropic accumulation. In FEP-AI, minds and brains are predictive controllers for autonomous systems, where action-driven perception is realized as probabilistic inference. Integrated Information Theory (IIT) begins with...
The idea that the brain learns generative models of the world has been widely promulgated. Most approaches have assumed that the brain learns an explicit density model that assigns a probability to each possible state of the world. However, explicit density models are difficult to learn, requiring approximate inference techniques that may find poor solutions. An alternative approach is to learn...