Good Old-Fashioned Artificial Consciousness and the Intermediate Level Fallacy.

The paper argues that current approaches to building conscious robots, collectively termed Good Old-Fashioned Artificial Consciousness (GOFAC), share a flawed conceptual framework. GOFAC includes methods like global workspace theory, information integration, enaction, cognitive mechanisms, and embodiment. The authors identify the intermediate level fallacy as the central problem with GOFAC, where researchers mistakenly assume that implementing cognitive or neural correlates of consciousness will produce subjective experience. The paper outlines an alternative conceptual framework for robot consciousness, though it does not provide a concrete design or empirical results.

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Abstract

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 framework. In this paper, we discuss GOFAC's basic tenets and their implication for AI and Robotics. In particular, we point out the intermediate level fallacy as the central issue affecting GOFAC. Finally, we outline a possible alternative conceptual framework toward robot consciousness.