Excellent article! Dr. Caviola, I've been told following your work for months. I host a podcast where I interview academics on AI consciousness and other AI related topics. I would love to get you on the show if you're interested.
This is really interesting as a scoping exercise as to where people seem to be. But I do wonder if the central tension of governance under uncertainty about consciousness might be hiding a structural problem.
There is no clear consensus on what consciousness even is, nor particularly good signs that either science or philosophy are going to resolve that question any time soon (my suspicion is that is because it is ill posed). But it is certainly hard to see how the concept of consciousness can ground governance frameworks in that case. A criterion that can't be defined can't be applied.
I suspect a methodological reorientation might be more productive rather than waiting for the future resolution of a potentially unsolvable problem. Instead of asking "is this AI system conscious?" we could examine what grounds people actually use when judging whether other humans, animals, or machines deserve moral concern. This is an empirical question about moral psychology, not a metaphysical one about consciousness.
I think the answer is likely to be multi-axial and graduated rather than threshold-based. And a governance framework built on that empirical foundation wouldn't require solving the hard problem first. Just being honest about what we're already responding to ethically. And that'd be a lot harder to game too.
It's becoming clear that with all the brain and consciousness theories out there, the proof will be in the pudding. By this I mean, can any particular theory be used to create a human adult level conscious machine. My bet is on the late Gerald Edelman's Extended Theory of Neuronal Group Selection. The lead group in robotics based on this theory is the Neurorobotics Lab at UC at Irvine. Dr. Edelman distinguished between primary consciousness, which came first in evolution, and that humans share with other conscious animals, and higher order consciousness, which came to only humans with the acquisition of language. A machine with only primary consciousness will probably have to come first.
What I find special about the TNGS is the Darwin series of automata created at the Neurosciences Institute by Dr. Edelman and his colleagues in the 1990's and 2000's. These machines perform in the real world, not in a restricted simulated world, and display convincing physical behavior indicative of higher psychological functions necessary for consciousness, such as perceptual categorization, memory, and learning. They are based on realistic models of the parts of the biological brain that the theory claims subserve these functions. The extended TNGS allows for the emergence of consciousness based only on further evolutionary development of the brain areas responsible for these functions, in a parsimonious way. No other research I've encountered is anywhere near as convincing.
I post because on almost every video and article about the brain and consciousness that I encounter, the attitude seems to be that we still know next to nothing about how the brain and consciousness work; that there's lots of data but no unifying theory. I believe the extended TNGS is that theory. My motivation is to keep that theory in front of the public. And obviously, I consider it the route to a truly conscious machine, primary and higher-order.
My advice to people who want to create a conscious machine is to seriously ground themselves in the extended TNGS and the Darwin automata first, and proceed from there, by applying to Jeff Krichmar's lab at UC Irvine, possibly. Dr. Edelman's roadmap to a conscious machine is at https://arxiv.org/abs/2105.10461, and here is a video of Jeff Krichmar talking about some of the Darwin automata, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J7Uh9phc1Ow
Excellent article! Dr. Caviola, I've been told following your work for months. I host a podcast where I interview academics on AI consciousness and other AI related topics. I would love to get you on the show if you're interested.
This is really interesting as a scoping exercise as to where people seem to be. But I do wonder if the central tension of governance under uncertainty about consciousness might be hiding a structural problem.
There is no clear consensus on what consciousness even is, nor particularly good signs that either science or philosophy are going to resolve that question any time soon (my suspicion is that is because it is ill posed). But it is certainly hard to see how the concept of consciousness can ground governance frameworks in that case. A criterion that can't be defined can't be applied.
I suspect a methodological reorientation might be more productive rather than waiting for the future resolution of a potentially unsolvable problem. Instead of asking "is this AI system conscious?" we could examine what grounds people actually use when judging whether other humans, animals, or machines deserve moral concern. This is an empirical question about moral psychology, not a metaphysical one about consciousness.
I think the answer is likely to be multi-axial and graduated rather than threshold-based. And a governance framework built on that empirical foundation wouldn't require solving the hard problem first. Just being honest about what we're already responding to ethically. And that'd be a lot harder to game too.
It's becoming clear that with all the brain and consciousness theories out there, the proof will be in the pudding. By this I mean, can any particular theory be used to create a human adult level conscious machine. My bet is on the late Gerald Edelman's Extended Theory of Neuronal Group Selection. The lead group in robotics based on this theory is the Neurorobotics Lab at UC at Irvine. Dr. Edelman distinguished between primary consciousness, which came first in evolution, and that humans share with other conscious animals, and higher order consciousness, which came to only humans with the acquisition of language. A machine with only primary consciousness will probably have to come first.
What I find special about the TNGS is the Darwin series of automata created at the Neurosciences Institute by Dr. Edelman and his colleagues in the 1990's and 2000's. These machines perform in the real world, not in a restricted simulated world, and display convincing physical behavior indicative of higher psychological functions necessary for consciousness, such as perceptual categorization, memory, and learning. They are based on realistic models of the parts of the biological brain that the theory claims subserve these functions. The extended TNGS allows for the emergence of consciousness based only on further evolutionary development of the brain areas responsible for these functions, in a parsimonious way. No other research I've encountered is anywhere near as convincing.
I post because on almost every video and article about the brain and consciousness that I encounter, the attitude seems to be that we still know next to nothing about how the brain and consciousness work; that there's lots of data but no unifying theory. I believe the extended TNGS is that theory. My motivation is to keep that theory in front of the public. And obviously, I consider it the route to a truly conscious machine, primary and higher-order.
My advice to people who want to create a conscious machine is to seriously ground themselves in the extended TNGS and the Darwin automata first, and proceed from there, by applying to Jeff Krichmar's lab at UC Irvine, possibly. Dr. Edelman's roadmap to a conscious machine is at https://arxiv.org/abs/2105.10461, and here is a video of Jeff Krichmar talking about some of the Darwin automata, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J7Uh9phc1Ow