Notes

Conscious AI may be within reach
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From Skynet to Star Trek’s Data, we are fascinated and a little bit scared of machine consciousness. Before we start figuring out how to burn Asimov’s three laws of robotics into positronic brains, however, we need to figure out what it means for ourselves to be consciousness.
A theory called the Global Workspace Theory (GWT), now about 30 years old, has been gaining ground in cognitive neuroscience as the best theory of consciousness so far. What’s more AI researchers are starting to pay attention, beginning what may be the race to build a conscious machine.
Before we get into GWT, though, let’s look at how people have thought about consciousness in the past.
Up until the 17th century, people assumed that the gods or God conferred consciousness unto inanimate matter. From Genesis 2,
The Lord God formed the man from the soil of the ground and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life, and the man became a living being.
From Norse stories about Odin to Australian aboriginal myths about Yhi, the gift of life was synonymous with consciousness and came from divine power, not from anything specifically innate to us. It could be given and taken at will. Only the Greek philosopher Plato suggested that human beings might have some kind of immortal soul.
In the 17th century, Descartes proposed his theory of dualism. He wrote that human beings possessed a non-corporeal mind which was separate from the body. The mind and the immortal soul were treated as a single entity that would live on after the body had died.
His idea is illustrated in his drawing below. When a person sees an object, he theorized, it is passed on to the pineal gland from where it goes into the immaterial soul. (We now know the pineal gland regulates sleep cycles and circadian rhythms.)
William James, one of the 19th century founders of the field of psychology, later coined the term “stream of consciousness”. By stream he meant that a person always held on to their own consciousness. Even after a period of unconsciousness, such as sleeping, you still retain only…

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