Pub Date : 2010-06-01DOI: 10.1142/S1793843010000254
C. Castelfranchi
After discussing a possible contradiction in Sloman's very challenging intervention, I stress the need for not identifying "consciousness" with phenomenal consciousness and with the "qualia" problem. I claim that it is necessary to distinguish different forms and functions of "consciousness" and to explicitly model them, also by exploiting the specific advantage of AI: to make experiments impossible in nature, by separating what cannot be separated in human behavior/mind. As for phenomenal consciousness, one should first be able to model what it means to have a "body" and to "feel" it.
{"title":"CONSCIOUSNESS OR CONSCIOUSNESSES? MODELING FOR DISENTANGLING","authors":"C. Castelfranchi","doi":"10.1142/S1793843010000254","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1142/S1793843010000254","url":null,"abstract":"After discussing a possible contradiction in Sloman's very challenging intervention, I stress the need for not identifying \"consciousness\" with phenomenal consciousness and with the \"qualia\" problem. I claim that it is necessary to distinguish different forms and functions of \"consciousness\" and to explicitly model them, also by exploiting the specific advantage of AI: to make experiments impossible in nature, by separating what cannot be separated in human behavior/mind. As for phenomenal consciousness, one should first be able to model what it means to have a \"body\" and to \"feel\" it.","PeriodicalId":418022,"journal":{"name":"International Journal of Machine Consciousness","volume":"36 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2010-06-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"123510605","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2010-06-01DOI: 10.1142/S1793843010000321
John G. Taylor
Aaron Sloman begins his stimulating article from the very negative claim: ... the notion of consciousness is so ill-de ned (...) that there is no point even discussing it except to show why it is worthless in scienti c contexts, though the adjective ‘conscious' has many uses in ordinary conversation and medical contexts." [Sloman, 2009]. So he both has his cake and eats it, this would seem to imply. It is alright to employ conscious" in matters of life and death (as in determining whether a patient is in a vegetative state or not, or in understanding the experiences of a schizophrenic), but not in polite scienti c discourse (at least when Aaron Sloman is around). Instead we must create models of all possible competences" of animals (including humans) and then we have done the necessary work. These competences need not have behavioral results, i.e. they could be non-behavioral competences", according to Sloman. It is not clear exactly what is a non-behavioral competence", since that is not explicitly de ned in the article, but it seems to include some level of introspection or inner report. Sloman's claim that if such a modeling program is completely carried out ... then there will be nothing left to be explained about human consciousness." [Sloman, 2009]. If the notion of a competence is expanded to also include the results obtained by brain imaging from all possible sources (fMRI, PET, EEG, MEG, multielectrode-based MUAs and LFPs and synchronizations, causal °ows of brain activity and e®ects of TMS) then I would agree that such would be the set of all possible objective observables. At the same time the inner report of subjects in these various states must also be used to justify them. The results of these myriads of experiments must therefore be modeled accurately in order to have a beginning basis of brain activity supporting the various states of consciousness (provided the measurements are taken in all possible states of awareness: SWS or REM sleep, whilst awake, under International Journal of Machine Consciousness Vol. 2, No. 1 (2010) 65 68 #.c World Scienti c Publishing Company DOI: 10.1142/S1793843010000321
{"title":"THERE IS MORE THAN AI BENEATH THE SURFACE OF CONSCIOUSNESS","authors":"John G. Taylor","doi":"10.1142/S1793843010000321","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1142/S1793843010000321","url":null,"abstract":"Aaron Sloman begins his stimulating article from the very negative claim: ... the notion of consciousness is so ill-de ned (...) that there is no point even discussing it except to show why it is worthless in scienti c contexts, though the adjective ‘conscious' has many uses in ordinary conversation and medical contexts.\" [Sloman, 2009]. So he both has his cake and eats it, this would seem to imply. It is alright to employ conscious\" in matters of life and death (as in determining whether a patient is in a vegetative state or not, or in understanding the experiences of a schizophrenic), but not in polite scienti c discourse (at least when Aaron Sloman is around). Instead we must create models of all possible competences\" of animals (including humans) and then we have done the necessary work. These competences need not have behavioral results, i.e. they could be non-behavioral competences\", according to Sloman. It is not clear exactly what is a non-behavioral competence\", since that is not explicitly de ned in the article, but it seems to include some level of introspection or inner report. Sloman's claim that if such a modeling program is completely carried out ... then there will be nothing left to be explained about human consciousness.\" [Sloman, 2009]. If the notion of a competence is expanded to also include the results obtained by brain imaging from all possible sources (fMRI, PET, EEG, MEG, multielectrode-based MUAs and LFPs and synchronizations, causal °ows of brain activity and e®ects of TMS) then I would agree that such would be the set of all possible objective observables. At the same time the inner report of subjects in these various states must also be used to justify them. The results of these myriads of experiments must therefore be modeled accurately in order to have a beginning basis of brain activity supporting the various states of consciousness (provided the measurements are taken in all possible states of awareness: SWS or REM sleep, whilst awake, under International Journal of Machine Consciousness Vol. 2, No. 1 (2010) 65 68 #.c World Scienti c Publishing Company DOI: 10.1142/S1793843010000321","PeriodicalId":418022,"journal":{"name":"International Journal of Machine Consciousness","volume":"20 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2010-06-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"127599508","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2010-06-01DOI: 10.1142/S1793843010000400
A. Sloman
This paper extends three decades of work arguing that researchers who discuss consciousness should not restrict themselves only to (adult) human minds, but should study (and attempt to model) many kinds of minds, natural and artificial, thereby contributing to our understanding of the space containing all of them. We need to study what they do or can do, how they can do it, and how the natural ones can be emulated in synthetic minds. That requires: (a) understanding sets of requirements that are met by different sorts of minds, i.e. the niches that they occupy, (b) understanding the space of possible designs, and (c) understanding complex and varied relationships between requirements and designs. Attempts to model or explain any particular phenomenon, such as vision, emotion, learning, language use, or consciousness lead to muddle and confusion unless they are placed in that broader context. A methodology for making progress is summarised and a novel requirement proposed for a theory of how human minds work: the theory should support a single generic design for a learning, developing system that, in addition to meeting familiar requirements, should be capable of developing different and opposed philosophical viewpoints about consciousness, and the so-called hard problem. In other words, we need a common explanation for the mental machinations of mysterians, materialists, functionalists, identity theorists, and those who regard all such theories as attempting to answer incoherent questions. No designs proposed so far come close.
{"title":"AN ALTERNATIVE TO WORKING ON MACHINE CONSCIOUSNESS","authors":"A. Sloman","doi":"10.1142/S1793843010000400","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1142/S1793843010000400","url":null,"abstract":"This paper extends three decades of work arguing that researchers who discuss consciousness should not restrict themselves only to (adult) human minds, but should study (and attempt to model) many kinds of minds, natural and artificial, thereby contributing to our understanding of the space containing all of them. We need to study what they do or can do, how they can do it, and how the natural ones can be emulated in synthetic minds. That requires: (a) understanding sets of requirements that are met by different sorts of minds, i.e. the niches that they occupy, (b) understanding the space of possible designs, and (c) understanding complex and varied relationships between requirements and designs. Attempts to model or explain any particular phenomenon, such as vision, emotion, learning, language use, or consciousness lead to muddle and confusion unless they are placed in that broader context. A methodology for making progress is summarised and a novel requirement proposed for a theory of how human minds work: the theory should support a single generic design for a learning, developing system that, in addition to meeting familiar requirements, should be capable of developing different and opposed philosophical viewpoints about consciousness, and the so-called hard problem. In other words, we need a common explanation for the mental machinations of mysterians, materialists, functionalists, identity theorists, and those who regard all such theories as attempting to answer incoherent questions. No designs proposed so far come close.","PeriodicalId":418022,"journal":{"name":"International Journal of Machine Consciousness","volume":"45 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2010-06-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"114198029","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2010-06-01DOI: 10.1142/S179384301000028X
Elizabeth Irvine
Sloman suggests that although many try to model consciousness as a unitary and abstract entity, the project is an incoherent one. This claim will be supported, but it will also be argued that current movements in consciousness research are broadly consistent with Sloman's "alternative" suggestions of how best to make progress in this area.
{"title":"HOW ALTERNATIVE IS THE ALTERNATIVE","authors":"Elizabeth Irvine","doi":"10.1142/S179384301000028X","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1142/S179384301000028X","url":null,"abstract":"Sloman suggests that although many try to model consciousness as a unitary and abstract entity, the project is an incoherent one. This claim will be supported, but it will also be argued that current movements in consciousness research are broadly consistent with Sloman's \"alternative\" suggestions of how best to make progress in this area.","PeriodicalId":418022,"journal":{"name":"International Journal of Machine Consciousness","volume":"95 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2010-06-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"133649903","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2010-06-01DOI: 10.1142/S1793843010000230
I. Aleksander
Sloman's critique of almost all the work that goes under the heading of Machine Consciousness (MC) stems from his assertion that one cannot base a constructive science on a confused concept. This brief comment is an attempt to look at some bits of Sloman's own contribution, whether he overcomes this difficulty or whether the difficulty may be addressed through the very use of a constructive science that might clarify a seemingly confused concept.
{"title":"DOES SLOMAN CRITICISE SLOMAN","authors":"I. Aleksander","doi":"10.1142/S1793843010000230","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1142/S1793843010000230","url":null,"abstract":"Sloman's critique of almost all the work that goes under the heading of Machine Consciousness (MC) stems from his assertion that one cannot base a constructive science on a confused concept. This brief comment is an attempt to look at some bits of Sloman's own contribution, whether he overcomes this difficulty or whether the difficulty may be addressed through the very use of a constructive science that might clarify a seemingly confused concept.","PeriodicalId":418022,"journal":{"name":"International Journal of Machine Consciousness","volume":"92 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2010-06-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"114484999","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2010-06-01DOI: 10.1142/S1793843010000412
A. Sloman
This is a reply to commentaries on my article "An Alternative to Working on Machine Consciousness". Reading the commentaries caused me to write a lengthy background tutorial paper explaining some of the assumptions that were taken for granted in the target article, and pointing out various confusions regarding the notion of consciousness, including many related to its polymorphism, taken for granted in the target article. This response to commentaries builds on that background material, attempting to address the main questions, objections and misunderstandings found in the responses, several of which were a result of my own brevity and lack of clarity in the original target article, now remedied, I hope by the background article [Sloman, 2010b].
{"title":"MACHINE CONSCIOUSNESS: RESPONSE TO COMMENTARIES","authors":"A. Sloman","doi":"10.1142/S1793843010000412","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1142/S1793843010000412","url":null,"abstract":"This is a reply to commentaries on my article \"An Alternative to Working on Machine Consciousness\". Reading the commentaries caused me to write a lengthy background tutorial paper explaining some of the assumptions that were taken for granted in the target article, and pointing out various confusions regarding the notion of consciousness, including many related to its polymorphism, taken for granted in the target article. This response to commentaries builds on that background material, attempting to address the main questions, objections and misunderstandings found in the responses, several of which were a result of my own brevity and lack of clarity in the original target article, now remedied, I hope by the background article [Sloman, 2010b].","PeriodicalId":418022,"journal":{"name":"International Journal of Machine Consciousness","volume":"106 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2010-06-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"124770004","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2010-06-01DOI: 10.1142/S1793843010000308
A. Samsonovich
{"title":"IS IT TIME FOR THE NEW COGNITIVE REVOLUTION","authors":"A. Samsonovich","doi":"10.1142/S1793843010000308","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1142/S1793843010000308","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":418022,"journal":{"name":"International Journal of Machine Consciousness","volume":"02 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2010-06-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"131169451","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2010-06-01DOI: 10.1142/S179384301000031X
R. Sanz
The lack of clarity concerning the issues at stake in machine consciousness and the unclear objectives pursued by the different approaches are the main reasons behind the half-program, half-pun Sloman's proposal of an alternative approach to the problem of machine consciousness, based on the construction of a robotic phenomenologist.
{"title":"IS THERE ANYTHING OR NOTHING? ON THE PROPER STANCE FOR CONSCIOUSNESS ANALYSIS","authors":"R. Sanz","doi":"10.1142/S179384301000031X","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1142/S179384301000031X","url":null,"abstract":"The lack of clarity concerning the issues at stake in machine consciousness and the unclear objectives pursued by the different approaches are the main reasons behind the half-program, half-pun Sloman's proposal of an alternative approach to the problem of machine consciousness, based on the construction of a robotic phenomenologist.","PeriodicalId":418022,"journal":{"name":"International Journal of Machine Consciousness","volume":"2 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2010-06-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"121612340","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2010-06-01DOI: 10.1142/S1793843010000424
A. Sloman
This paper is an attempt to summarise and justify critical comments I have been making over several decades about research on consciousness by philosophers, scientists and engineers. This includes (a) explaining why the concept of "phenomenal consciousness" (P-C), in the sense defined by Ned Block, is semantically flawed and unsuitable as a target for scientific research or machine modelling, whereas something like the concept of "access consciousness" (A-C) with which it is often contrasted refers to phenomena that can be described and explained within a future scientific theory, and (b) explaining why the "hard problem" is a bogus problem, because of its dependence on the P-C concept. It is compared with another bogus problem, "the 'hard' problem of spatial identity" introduced as part of a tutorial on semantically flawed concepts. Different types of semantic flaw and conceptual confusion not normally studied outside analytical philosophy are distinguished. The semantic flaws of the "zombie" argument, closely allied with the P-C concept are also explained. These topics are related both to the evolution of human and animal minds and brains and to requirements for human-like robots. The diversity of the phenomena related to the concept "consciousness" as ordinarily used makes it a polymorphic concept, partly analogous to concepts like "efficient", "sensitive", and "impediment" all of which need extra information to be provided before they can be applied to anything, and then the criteria of applicability differ. As a result there cannot be one explanation of consciousness, one set of neural associates of consciousness, one explanation for the evolution of consciousness, nor one machine model of consciousness. We need many of each. I present a way of making progress based on what McCarthy called "the designer stance", using facts about running virtual machines, without which current computers obviously could not work. I suggest the same is true of biological minds, because biological evolution long ago "discovered" a need for something like virtual machinery for self-monitoring and self-extending information-processing systems, and produced far more sophisticated versions than human engineers have so far achieved.
{"title":"PHENOMENAL AND ACCESS CONSCIOUSNESS AND THE \"HARD\" PROBLEM: A VIEW FROM THE DESIGNER STANCE","authors":"A. Sloman","doi":"10.1142/S1793843010000424","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1142/S1793843010000424","url":null,"abstract":"This paper is an attempt to summarise and justify critical comments I have been making over several decades about research on consciousness by philosophers, scientists and engineers. This includes (a) explaining why the concept of \"phenomenal consciousness\" (P-C), in the sense defined by Ned Block, is semantically flawed and unsuitable as a target for scientific research or machine modelling, whereas something like the concept of \"access consciousness\" (A-C) with which it is often contrasted refers to phenomena that can be described and explained within a future scientific theory, and (b) explaining why the \"hard problem\" is a bogus problem, because of its dependence on the P-C concept. It is compared with another bogus problem, \"the 'hard' problem of spatial identity\" introduced as part of a tutorial on semantically flawed concepts. Different types of semantic flaw and conceptual confusion not normally studied outside analytical philosophy are distinguished. The semantic flaws of the \"zombie\" argument, closely allied with the P-C concept are also explained. These topics are related both to the evolution of human and animal minds and brains and to requirements for human-like robots. The diversity of the phenomena related to the concept \"consciousness\" as ordinarily used makes it a polymorphic concept, partly analogous to concepts like \"efficient\", \"sensitive\", and \"impediment\" all of which need extra information to be provided before they can be applied to anything, and then the criteria of applicability differ. As a result there cannot be one explanation of consciousness, one set of neural associates of consciousness, one explanation for the evolution of consciousness, nor one machine model of consciousness. We need many of each. I present a way of making progress based on what McCarthy called \"the designer stance\", using facts about running virtual machines, without which current computers obviously could not work. I suggest the same is true of biological minds, because biological evolution long ago \"discovered\" a need for something like virtual machinery for self-monitoring and self-extending information-processing systems, and produced far more sophisticated versions than human engineers have so far achieved.","PeriodicalId":418022,"journal":{"name":"International Journal of Machine Consciousness","volume":"3 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2010-06-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"123485772","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
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