Re: the intersection between AIKR and COGAI

> On 27 Oct 2022, at 15:29, ProjectParadigm-ICT-Program <metadataportals@yahoo.com> wrote:
> 
> In my humble opinion we must minimally incorporate the bottom three levels, being CONSCIOUSNESS, MIND, BRAIN into a minimal set of conceptual frameworks for knowledge representation for AI.
> 
> Which forces us to tackle the consciousness level for which we need to engage philosophers and psychologists to eliminate the notion of the HARD PROBLEM of consciousness.

Is consciousness really that difficult to define?  The dictionary definition is pretty straightforward, e.g.

Oxford: the state of being aware of and responsive to one's surroundings

Cambridge: the state of understanding and realising something, a person's awareness or perception of something.

Merriam Webster: the quality or state of being aware especially of something within oneself, the state or fact of being conscious of an external object, state, or fact, the state of being characterised by sensation, emotion, volition, and thought

You might ask what it means to be aware of something or to understand something.  I don’t see anything difficult there. For a system to be aware of something, it is sufficient to have access to a model that describes that thing, e.g. that the traffic lights are now green, so that it is okay to drive forward. Likewise, understanding is essentially being able to reason about a model of a thing, i.e. to draw inferences or conclusions.  Free will is the capacity of minds to choose, i.e. to reason. Moreover, reasoning is non-deterministic when based upon stochastic processes.

None of these definitions present huge challenges for creating artificial minds.  I consider consciousness to be a characteristic of mind, which in turn is the function of a computational system, whether biological or electronic.

However, this is taking a mechanistic reductionist perspective, and I accept that some people aren’t interested in science or engineering oriented explanations, and may want to use their own definition of English words. I suspect that that is related to mind-body dualism, and presumptions about people having souls, but not animals nor machines.  This is likely to fuel prejudices about AI rather than positive steps to ensure AI serves humanity as a whole.

Dave Raggett <dsr@w3.org>