What is consciousness, and could machines have it?
Abstract
The controversial question of whether machines may ever be conscious must be based on a careful consideration of how consciousness arises in the only physical system that undoubtedly possesses it: the human brain. We suggest that the word “consciousness” conflates two different types of information-processing computations in the brain: the selection of information for global broadcasting, thus making it flexibly available for computation and report (C1, consciousness in the first sense), and the self-monitoring of those computations, leading to a subjective sense of certainty or error (C2, consciousness in the second sense). We argue that despite their recent successes, current machines are still mostly implementing computations that reflect unconscious processing (C0) in the human brain. We review the psychological and neural science of unconscious (C0) and conscious computations (C1 and C2) and outline how they may inspire novel machine architectures.
Document Details
- Document Type
- Pub Defense Publication
- Publication Date
- Oct 27, 2017
- Source ID
- 10.1126/science.aan8871
Entities
People
- Hakwan Lau
- Sid Kouider
- Stanislas Dehaene
Organizations
- Agence Nationale de la Recherche
- Air Force Office of Scientific Research
- Alternative Energies and Atomic Energy Commission
- Canadian Institute for Advanced Research
- Collège de France
- European Research Council
- French National Institute of Health and Medical Research
- National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke
- University of California, Los Angeles
- University of Hong Kong
- University of Paris-Sud
- École Normale Supérieure