A Global Workspace Model Implementation and its Relations with Philosophy of Mind
E.c. Garrido-Merchán, M. Molina, Francisco M. Mendoza-Soto
Journal of Artificial Intelligence and Consciousness October 25, 2021 DOI: 10.1142/s270507852150020x (opens in new tab)
Study at a glance
AI-extracted from the abstract| Characteristics | Theoretical or philosophical paper with experimental simulation Peer reviewed |
|---|---|
| Topics | Philosophy of mind |
| Citations | 4 |
| Key findings | Proposes that autonomous agents with a global-workspace cognitive architecture can show enhanced performance in navigating multi-magnitude environments, suggesting potential benefits from imitating conscious-like information processing. |
Abstract
This work seeks to study the beneficial properties that an autonomous agent can obtain by imitating a cognitive architecture similar to that of conscious beings. Throughout this document, a cognitive model of an autonomous agent-based in a global workspace architecture is presented. We hypothesize that consciousness is an evolutionary advantage, so if our autonomous agent can be potentially conscious, its performance will be enhanced. We explore whether an autonomous agent implementing a cognitive architecture like the one proposed in the global workspace theory can be conscious from a philosophy of mind perspective, with a special emphasis on functionalism and multiple realizability. The purposes of our proposed model are to create autonomous agents that can navigate within an environment composed of multiple independent magnitudes, adapting to its surroundings to find the best possible position according to its inner preferences and to test the effectiveness of many of its cognitive mechanisms, such as an attention mechanism for magnitude selection, possession of inner feelings and preferences, usage of a memory system to storage beliefs and past experiences, and incorporating the consciousness bottleneck into the decision-making process, that controls and integrates information processed by all the subsystems of the model, as in global workspace theory. We show in a large experiment set how potentially conscious autonomous agents can benefit from having a cognitive architecture such as the one described.
Comparable studies
Other experimental studies on philosophy of mind, most cited first.
| Study | Year | Design | Participants |
|---|---|---|---|
| A Deep-Dream Virtual Reality Platform for Studying Altered Perceptual Phenomenology | 2017 | Experimental study | |
| New World Tryptamine Hallucinogens and the Neuroscience of Ayahuasca. | 2018 | Review with original neuroimaging and neurophysiological data | |
| Differential contributions of serotonergic and dopaminergic functional connectivity to the phenomenology of LSD Healthy adults | 2022 | Secondary analysis of experimental data | n = 15 |
| TMS-EEG and resting-state EEG applied to altered states of consciousness: oscillations, complexity, and phenomenology. | 2023 | Experimental study | |
| Training novice practitioners to reliably report their meditation experience using shared phenomenological dimensions. Novice meditation practitioners | 2019 | Neurophenomenological experiment |
Citations in the library
Cited by 1
Cites 8
- The rise of machine consciousness: studying consciousness with computational models. Neural Networks August 1, 2013
- The Global Workspace Theory of Consciousness December 13, 2007
- Human and Machine Consciousness March 7, 2018
- Integrated information theory: from consciousness to its physical substrate. Nature Reviews Neuroscience July 2016
- Explanatory Correlates of Consciousness: Theoretical and Computational Challenges Cognitive Computation January 25, 2009
and 3 more in the library