Woodruff makes two arguments to support his claim that ray-finned fish are conscious: (1) Fish ne... more Woodruff makes two arguments to support his claim that ray-finned fish are conscious: (1) Fish neuroanatomy has similarities with the structures in the human brain that support consciousness. (2) The complexity and flexibility of fish behaviour suggest that they are conscious. This commentary will argue that neither the neuroanatomical nor the behavioural argument can provide conclusive evidence for consciousness in fish. We should suspend judgement until we have discovered mathematical theories of consciousness that can reliably map between states of consciousness and states of the physical world.
Consciousness is extremely important to us. Without consciousness, there is just nothingness, dea... more Consciousness is extremely important to us. Without consciousness, there is just nothingness, death, night. It is a crime to kill a person who is potentially conscious. Permanently unconscious people are left to die. Religious people face death with hope because they believe that their conscious souls will break free from their physical bodies. We know next to nothing about consciousness and its relationship to the physical world. The science of consciousness is mired in philosophical problem..
Journal of Artificial Intelligence and Consciousness, 2021
A systematic understanding of the relationship between intelligence and consciousness can only be... more A systematic understanding of the relationship between intelligence and consciousness can only be achieved when we can accurately measure intelligence and consciousness. In other work, I have suggested how the measurement of consciousness can be improved by reframing the science of consciousness as a search for mathematical theories that map between physical and conscious states. This paper discusses the measurement of intelligence in natural and artificial systems. While reasonable methods exist for measuring intelligence in humans, these can only be partly generalized to non-human animals and they cannot be applied to artificial systems. Some universal measures of intelligence have been developed, but their dependence on goals and rewards creates serious problems. This paper sets out a new universal algorithm for measuring intelligence that is based on a system’s ability to make accurate predictions. This algorithm can measure intelligence in humans, non-human animals and artifici...
Full bibliographic details must be given when referring to, or quoting from full items including ... more Full bibliographic details must be given when referring to, or quoting from full items including the author's name, the title of the work, publication details where relevant (place, publisher, date), pagination, and for theses or dissertations the awarding institution, the degree type awarded, and the date of the award.
The development and analysis of conscious machines
... ABSTRACT ----- This PhD was carried out as part of the CRONOS project and one of its main ach... more ... ABSTRACT ----- This PhD was carried out as part of the CRONOS project and one of its main achievements was ... [ 2 ] 1.2 The CRONOS Project 1 ...
5. From Correlates to Theories of Consciousness
5.1 Measurement of the Physical World Randy is an elephant who lives at the bottom of my garden. ... more 5.1 Measurement of the Physical World Randy is an elephant who lives at the bottom of my garden. Six blind men often come round to feel Randy. Sometimes I like to measure Randy. To measure his height, I compare my conscious experience of Randy with my conscious experience of a stick that has been calibrated against the distance light travels in a vacuum during 1⁄299,792,458 seconds. The ratio between Randy and the stick is his height in metres. Randy is three sticks (three metres) high (see F..
Machine Consciousness 2011: Self, Integration and …
Information integration is a property of systems of connected elements that expresses the extent ... more Information integration is a property of systems of connected elements that expresses the extent to which they are capable of entering a large number of states that result from causal interactions among their elements. In recent years a number of people have claimed that there is a link between information integration and consciousness and a number of algorithms for measuring information integration have been put forward. This paper gives an overview of the conceptual and experimental issues surrounding information integration and explores some of the links between information integration and machine consciousness. 12
Synthetic phenomenology can be broken down into three areas: (1) the determination whether a syst... more Synthetic phenomenology can be broken down into three areas: (1) the determination whether a system is capable of phenomenal states, (2) the identification of the mental content of the machine (the machine’s conceptual and non-conceptual representations), and (3) the analysis of a particular structure of mental content to identify the parts that are phenomenally conscious. This paper proposes that an ordinal probability scale could be used to address the first of these problems and sets out a proposal for such a scale that ranks machines according to the likelihood that they are capable of experiencing phenomenal states. The overall approach suggested here will be used to describe the synthetic phenomenology of Holland’s and Troscianko’s ‘conscious ’ robot that is currently under development at the University of Essex and the University of Bristol.
The term ‘synthetic phenomenology ’ has been given a number of different interpretations and I wi... more The term ‘synthetic phenomenology ’ has been given a number of different interpretations and I will be using it here to refer to the determination whether artificial systems are capable of conscious states and the description of these states if they occur. This approach to synthetic phenomenology is similar to that put forward by Aleksander and Morton (2007) and it is close to the philosophical tradition of phenomenology, with the word “synthetic ” being added to indicate that it is the phenomenology of artificial systems that is being described. Synthetic phenomenology has a number of overlaps with the description of human phenomenology from a third person perspective using measurements of brain activity gathered using techniques, such as fMRI, EEG or electrodes. Good examples of this type of work are Kamitani and Tong (2005) and Kay et al. (2008), who used the patterns of intensity in fMRI voxels to make predictions about the phenomenal states of their subjects. One of the main ob...
Abstract- This paper describes two simulators that have been developed as part of Holland’s and T... more Abstract- This paper describes two simulators that have been developed as part of Holland’s and Troscianko’s project to build a conscious robot. The first simulates a reconfigurable humanoid robot within a dynamic environment. This robot is more biologically realistic than traditional humanoid robots because its movements are transmitted across its whole structure, which poses the same control problems that brains have to solve with biological systems. The second simulator in this paper simulates large numbers of spiking neurons with a flexibility and speed that makes it ideal for developing models of biologically structured neural networks. In combination these simulators will enable researchers to develop models of how the brain controls the human body and they will also be used to create and test controllers for the real CRONOS robot, on which the virtual robot is based. These tools are currently in their final stage of development and will soon be made freely available for non-c...
Research is starting to identify correlations between consciousness and some of the spatiotempora... more Research is starting to identify correlations between consciousness and some of the spatiotemporal patterns in the physical brain. For theoretical and practical reasons the results of experiments on the correlates of consciousness have ambiguous interpretations. At any point in time a number of hypotheses co-exist about and the correlates of consciousness in the brain, which are all compatible with the current experimental results. This article argues that consciousness should be attributed to any system that exhibits spatiotemporal physical patterns that match the hypotheses about the correlates of consciousness that are compatible with the current experimental results. Some computers running some programs should be attributed consciousness because they produce spatiotemporal patterns in the physical world that match those that are potentially linked with consciousness in the human brain.
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Papers by David Gamez