Machine Consciousness Flashcards
What is the difference between analysis and synthesis?
Analysis is basic science, whereas synthesis is engineering
Why attempt to build conscious machines?
The key intention is to clarify, through synthesis, the notion of what it is to be conscious
What are the advantages of focusing on consciousness rather than intelligence?
Performance payoffs. Better autonomy and freedom from pre-programming. An ability to represent the machine’s own role in it’s environment. Improve capacity for action based on inner contemplative activy rather than reactive action based largely on table-lookup (GOFAI - doesn’t allow for flexibility) of pre-stored contingency-action couplings (Aleksander, 2007)
What does GOFAI stand for?
Good Old-Fashioned AI
What is GOFAI?
The modelling or creation of intelligent machines centred on traditional computers, i.e. systems that process information, or symbols, according to explicitly coded rules. These symbols have no meaning (not grounded in real world) except as interpreted by the human programmer
What are some generally agreed GOFAI requirements for machine consciousness?
The brain is a control mechanism and ensures the organism deal appropriately with its external and internal environments, but not all control systems are conscious (eg thermostats). Also the ability to model the world and self, and to integrate the two
What are subsymbolic approaches?
Bottom-up, embodied, situated, behaviour-based AI. Rejected symbolic AI and focus on the basic engineering problems that would allow robots to move and survive. Higher intelligence and ‘mind’ can be created only by interacting in real time with real world, and thus that aspects of body are required. World provides constraints, information storage and feedback that make perception, learning and intelligence possible. No internal representations or models
What are hybrid intelligent systems?
Combine symbolic and subsymbolic approaches
What are some problems for GOFAI attempts to create conscious machines?
Why are some internal representations or models conscious and some not? How could a representation or model be an experience/conscious?
What are some problems for subsymbolic attempts to create conscious machines?
Need to explain why and how conscious experience arises out of continuous interaction with the outside world. How to create/deal with conscious experiences that are not driven by continuous interaction with the outside world, eg imagining, dreaming, reasoning?
Do conscious machines need to replicate brains?
A spectrum of positions on this question ranging from functionalists to physicalists who believe we need to get closer to physically replicating the human brain
What is strong AI according to Searle 1980?
The appropriately programmed computer is a mind, in the sense that computers given the right programs can be literally said to understand and have other cognitive states
What is strong AI according to Searle 1999?
The appropriately programmed computer with the right inputs and outputs would thereby have a mind in exaclty the same sense human beings have minds
What is computer functionalism (computationalism)?
Mental states are computational states. Computational states are implementation-independent (it is software that determines the computational state, not the hardware. Since the implementation is unimportant, the only empirical data that matters is how the system functions
What is the Turing Test?
A test of a machine’s ability to exhibit intelligent behaviour, equivalent to or indistinguishable from, that of an actual human