Towards Artificial Consciousness

Towards Artificial

ConsciousnessRiccardo Manzotti Vincenzo Tagliasco

Genova – September 26th 2006

“Emotions and consciousnessin human beings and machines”

Academic years 2003-04, 2004-05, 2005-06, 2006-07

Sometimes emotions are related to consciousness

Experience is related to (phenomenal) consciousness

Emotions and experience are two intertwined aspects

of human beings

Our students think that it is the brain, and not the human

being as a whole, that sees, perceives odors and tastes.

They are sure that the brain represents the outside world

inside their skull, and that the perception is based on mental

images.

They know perfectly the advances of neuroscience and are sure that, sooner or later, neuroscience will explain how

the wetware of our brain is transformed in percption and

thoughts.

On the contrary, according to our theory, the physical portion of the world (which is responsible for the mind) is not just the brain, but is

the collection of the processes starting from the environment and

endind in the brain. We are not internalists, but

externalists.For us the mind does not coincides

with the brain, but it is the collection of a large number of

processes.

Our students don’t like too much the consciousness issue.

There are no clear and assessed definitions of consciousness;too dominant is the role of

philosophy.There are many theories which

cannot be validated with the classical instruments of

engineering and science.

Ray Kurzweil wrote (The singularity is near, 2005) We assume that other humans are conscious, but even that is an assumption. There is no

consensus among humans about the consciousness of non-human entities, such as higher animals. […] The issue will be

even more contentious with regard to future non-biological entities that exhibit behavior and intelligence even more human-like than those of animals. […] So how will we come to terms with the consciousness that will be

claimed by non-biological intelligence?

From a practical perspective such claims will be accepted. […] These non-biological entities

will be extremely intelligent, so they’ll be able to convince other humans (biological, non-biological, or somewhere in between) that

they are conscious. They’ll have all the delicate emotional cues that convince us today that humans are conscious. They will be able

to make other humans laugh and cry. And they’ll get mad if others don’t accept their

claims.

Do engineers dream of conscious androids?

Do androids dream of electric sheep?Philip K. Dick, 1968

1976

The engineer is the one who builds objects

Time has come to build an artificial mind:

a subject

An artificial mind has not yet been built

For the first time in the history of engineering,

engineers try to build a subject, not an object

It is necessary a new paradigm

Why building an artificial mind?

To understand the mental we may have to invent further ways of looking at brains. We may even have to synthesize artifacts resembling brains connected to bodily functions in order fully to understand those processes. Although the day when we shall be able to create a such conscious artifacts is far off we may have to make them before we deeply understand the processes of thought itself.

G. Edelman, G. Tononi, 2000

From the editorial of Nature Neuroscience, volume 3 number

8 August 2000: In search of consciousness

• The philosopher John Searle once remarked: “Studying the brain without studying consciousness would be like studying the stomach without studying digestion.”Ten years ago, few researchers would have taken him seriously, but times are changing.

• It is too early to say whether studying perception will eventually lead to a unifying theory of consciousness. But considering that the topic was hardly on the scientific agenda a decade ago, it is impressive that so much agreement has been reached on how to proceed. It is no longer considered professional suicide for young experimentalists to study consciousness, and for a field that is itself so young, that represents progress.

Mind definitions

“The mind is a substance” Descartes“The mind is a function” Hume“The mind is a biological phenomenon” Searle“The mind does not exist” Amstrong, Ryle,

Dennett“The mind is a software” Putnam, Dennett“The mind is a system of control” Newell

“The mind is a mystery” Mc Ginn“The mind is an epiphenomenon” Ryle

“The mind is a physical phenomenon unknown to us until now”

Penrose, Hameroff

If a humanoid develops its own unique sensory and motor repertoire on the basis of its personal history and its own

choices (experience shaped)or

if a humanoid allows a unified set of counterfactual

representations to occur

we claim that

the humanoid will be equipped with artificial consciousness

Definition of artificial consciousness

In order to build a subject, engineers have to think about what is a subject, an object and

why a subject is different from an object.

Just because philosophers have coped with these topics for three thousands years,

engineers need to get inspiration from them.

Implicit in most theories of conscious perception is the supposition that, although an external event and its

representation in the brain are causally connected, they are nevertheless separate.

As against this, I outline a process oriented framework applicable to

perception which is a foundation for the proposal that there is a unity between the

“external world” and the “perceived world”.

The proposal is that the classic separation between subject and object must be reconceived so that the two, while

maintaining their identities as different perspectives on a process, actually occur

as a unity during perception.

This leads me to sketch out a new view of consciousness, which can be summarised by saying that consciousness consists in the occurrence of a unity between the brain and the part of the world that is being attended. Here, I use the word

‘unity’ in the same sense in which we say that a magnetic field is a unity that can be

described in terms of the different categories of a south and a north pole.

Unity• Conscious activity is

the physical process between the brain and the external world

The mind is different

from the matter

René Descartes XVII century

Since O≠Eneural scholars supposed that there must have been another Ephenomenal to make things even. However it was even worse since O is inaccessible, O≠Eneural, O≠Eneural and, of course,Eneural≠Ephenomenal

Cartesian Materialism

When a subject sees a rose, in her brain there is nothing with the property of that rose. On the contrary there are neural

patterns with completely different properties. Why should the latter be experienced as the former? Nobody

knows. Furthermore, nobody knows how phenomenal experience, supposedly

emergent from neural patterns functionally linked with external objects, is related with the physical properties of the

rose.

The “hard problem” is the result of the separation between perceiver and

perceived or between subject and object. If the perceiver is physically separate from

the external world, what is perceived must be something else – that is, a

representation of the external object. This view, attributed to René Descartes but actually formulated by Galileo Galilei

(Galilei 1623), posits a separation between the “external world” and the “mental

world”.

Does a falling tree in the forest make a sound if no one is near enough to hear it?We can say with certainty that while the fall creates pressure waves in the air, it does not create a sound. Sound occurs only when pressure waves from the falling tree reach and are perceived by a living being.

Thus, our perceptions are not direct records of the world around us but are constructed internally according to innate rules and constraints imposed by the capabilities of the nervous system.From: E.R. Kandel, J.H. Schwartz and T.M. Jessel, Essentials of Neural Science and Behaviour, 1995

• Therefore, I am inclined to think that these tastes, smells, colours, etc., with regard to the object in which they appear to reside, are nothing more than mere names, and exist only in the sensitive body; insomuch that when the living creature is removed all these qualities are carried off and annihilated;

Galileo Galilei, “The Essayer”, 1623

• Galileo, when for the first time set up his theory about primary and secondary properties did not know anything about electromagnetic waves and fundamental forces.

• The bunch of fundamental forces and elementary particles that constitute what a human being - by using his limited sensorial capacities, is able to isolate from other parts of physical reality and can define as “a tree” - establish a sort of bargain, a sort of agreement with a human being. This bunch say <Hey woman/man, if you give us the statute of a definite object, let’s say “a tree”, we enrich your statute of subject, or better, we cooperate to build you as “a subject”>.

Why bother with objects? Because objects as wholes are fundamental

facts of everyday life. We continuously and effortlessly deal with them, were

they chairs, tables, buildings, cars, computers, trees, clouds, hands,

bodies. There seems to be an unavoidable tendency to perceive the

world as made of objects.

There is not a rock inside the box:there is only a myriad of occurrences without unification

The second rock cannot unify the occurrences coming from the first rock

A human being is able to give meaning to the rock;but this is too obvious. Let’s go back to the example.

Even in presence of an egg, the rock continues to have no meaning and no existence as a unity

The rock_object springs up.The first semantic content of the chick_subject springs up.

Something like the first stone of the Great Wall of China:The stone didn’t know it was going to be part

of the future Great Wall

The rock_object has caused the birth of a relation between the rock_event and the chick_event.

rock_event(rock_eventchick_event)

The chick, as a subject, does not happen if the rock had not happened as an object.

We cannot talk about them separately.We have to look at the relation

rock_event(rock_eventchick_event)

from two different point of view.The constitutive element of reality is the relation.

The presence of the hen increases the number of relations inside the box. Another relation occurs:

hen_event(hen_eventchick_event)chick_event(chick_eventhen_event)rock_event(rock _eventchick_event)rock _event(rock _eventhen_event)

Internalism vs Externalism

• Internalism: the brain is necessary and sufficient for the occurrence of the mind

• Externalism: not all mental things are exclusively located inside the head [or mind] of the persona or creature that has these things

Cristoph Koch, The Quest for Consciousness, Roberts & Company, 2004

A (radical) externalist approach

subject and object are not two separate entities:

they aretwo ways of describing the same

physical process

When the sun is sufficienttly lowon the horizon and projects its rays at an appropriate angle against a cloud, all the

drops reflect the sunlight.

If there were no observers, the rays would not produce an effect as a whole because they would continue their travel in space without interacting.

Only those rays which have a particular geometrical relation to the observer are seen as a part of the rainbow

A given rainbow exists only when the observer

is in a given position with respect to the external stimuli

If there were no observers, the rays will lose their opportunity to produce a joint effect.

Therefore their cause (the supposed rainbow) would not have produced any effect and would

not have existed as a cause.It could only have a theoretical existence.We assumed that there must have been a

rainbow, but there wasn’t one.

If an observer were there, the rays would have hit her/his photoreceptors and a complex chain

of physical processes would have continued from the retina to the cortical areas up to a

point where the recognition of the rainbow as a whole would have taken place. Thanks to the

existence of the physical structure of the observer, the drops of water of the rainbow

have been able to produce a joint effect.

Until the whole process is concluded there is no actual rainbow.

Something could happen at the very last moment in order to interfere with the completion of the process.

Something that happens AFTERWARDS seems to be

responsible for the existence of something that should have existed

BEFORE. This is apparently paradoxical

The rainbow shows that the existence of the cause (the collection of reflecting drops taken as a whole) is abstract until the effect (the rainbow) is actually occurred.

“The effect is a necessary condition for the occurrence of the cause as the cause is a necessary condition of the occurence of the effect”

The cause of the cause is the effectThe effect of the effect is the cause

In order to deal with the apparent paradox, we have to drop the unneeded

assumption that the cause is separated from the effect,

that there is a separation between the perceived and the perceiver.

If we focus on the process, which is a unity since its parts cannot exist separately, the

paradox vanishes.

There are not two ‘things’ (dualism) • the neural process in the brain

and • the external object to be perceived

There is just a single process(it is at the same time what exists, ontos, and

what is perceived, phenomenon)

Unity• Conscious activity is

the physical process between the brain and the external world

The unifying approach

Since the brain, as an object, is separate from what the brain perceives (the external world), it is necessary to postulate the existence of purely mental counterparts of the physical properties of the external world.

I set aside the assumption of the separation between the external world and the brain. The brain as an object is obviously separate from the environment. The brain activity as a process is much less obviously separate from the events in the environment.

Brain and events are the two sides of the same flow of events.

• The brain is necessary for the occurrence of processes identical with the conscious mind but it is no longer sufficient. The mind is the world whereas the content of consciousness is that particular object/event/state of affairs, whose taking place as cause is possible by means of the effect taking place in the brain.

• Conscious perception is the process itself.• The mind can thus be seen as the set of processes

whose centre is the brain. The external world becomes literally constitutive of the mind. These processes extend the causal powers of the environment. They single out the world as known by the subject.

Think of six dots on a wall. They are there by chance. After a while, a human subject, observing the wall,

becomes familiar with them and develops a cognitive structure to recognize them. They are perceived as a

gestalt, as a unity. Because of a change in their environment (in the subject’s brain), those dots gained the status of being a pattern, yet the change was not in their

physical structure, but in the subject’s brain.

Six black dots. They have been repeated four times. Each time a different possible meaning has been shown: an hexagon, King David’s Star, two triangles, and six isolated dots.

Meaning

The six dots have acquired a new causal power. Before the first occurrence of such a process, they had no causal

power at all. Therefore they were only a potential entity. They did not exist. Afterwards they became the cause of a process. They took place for the first time. Likewise, the

change in the observer’s brain was produced by something which, as a unity, was not yet there.

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What are objects?

. The grey cross seems to be the most autonomous. The other two are more

arbitrarily created by the perceiver (a cross of characters ‘1’ and a cross of prime

numbers). The crosses exist (take place) because they interact with the brain.

Conversely, the brain can interact with them because they exist.

The man in the moon and the face on marsDo they have causal powers as wholes?

. The observer is modified and the collection of many parts is the cause of a new physical

process as a whole. When the face is perceived as a whole it comes into existence. The whole is part of the

conscious mind.There is no mental face. There is one face

taking place.

•A conscious mind is a huge collection of experiences•A conscious mind is extended in time and space to include the external world

ConclusionsConclusions

Conscious phenomenaare physically identical

to processes involving both the external world and the brain

Subject and object are two ways of describing the same process