An essay on building a consciousness (Introduction)

by David Turell , Saturday, July 11, 2015, 23:54 (3422 days ago)

By a professor of neuroscience at Princeton. He has his own theory involving "attention information". I'd read all of it:- http://aeon.co/magazine/psychology/is-consciousness-an-engineering-problem/-I've made my own entry into that race, a framework for understanding consciousness called the Attention Schema theory. The theory suggests that consciousness is no bizarre byproduct - it's a tool for regulating information in the brain. And it's not as mysterious as most people think. As ambitious as it sounds, I believe we're close to understanding consciousness well enough to build it.-***-Alas, we can no longer dip into standard neuroscience. Whereas we have decades of research on internal models of concrete things such as tennis balls, there's virtually nothing on internal models of attention. It hadn't occurred to scientists that such a thing might exist. Still, there's no particular mystery about what it might look like. To build it into our robot, we once again need to decide what information should be present. Presumably, like the internal model of the ball, it would describe general, abstracted properties of attention, not microscopic physical details.-***
How does that subtle essence emerging from the brain turn around and exert physical forces, directing this pathway and that synapse, enabling me to type about it, or scholars to argue about it? There is a kind of magical incoherence about the approach.-But we don't need magic to explain the phenomenon. Brains insist they have consciousness. That insistence is the result of introspection: of cognitive machinery accessing deeper internal information. And an internal model of attention, like the one we added to our build-a-brain, would contain exactly, but exactly, that information.-***-It says: ‘There is no physical mechanism. It just is. It is non-physical and it's located inside me. Just as my arms and legs are physical parts of me, there's also a non-physical part of me. It mentally possesses things and allows me to act with respect to those things. It's my consciousness.'-***-Consciousness matters. Unlike many modern attempts to explain it away, the Attention Schema theory does exactly the opposite of trivialising or dismissing. It gives it a place of importance.-As long as scholars think of consciousness as a magic essence floating inside the brain, it won't be very interesting to engineers. But if it's a crucial set of information, a kind of map that allows the brain to function correctly, then engineers may want to know about it. And that brings us back to artificial intelligence. Gone are the days of waiting for computers to get so complicated that they spontaneously become conscious. And gone are the days of dismissing consciousness as an airy-fairy essence that would bring no obvious practical benefit to a computer anyway. Suddenly it becomes an incredibly useful tool for the machine.