Re: consciousness, and AI KR

From the AI KR and computational view consciousness isn’t a hard problem.  Subjective experience distils to information processing with systems of neurons. Redness is just a vector of neural activation. Agents have situational awareness, i.e. a model of their current environment and goals, enabling them to decide on what actions to take. This also includes models of other agent’s beliefs and goals, i.e. a theory of mind.  Agents also benefit from a model of past, present and future, i.e. a functional episodic memory that complements encyclopaedic memory, such as birds fly and dogs bark. Episodic memory enables agents to reason about cause and effect, to understand intent, and to create and adapt plans.

However, this won’t convince everyone.  Plenty of people have beliefs that are a matter of faith rather than of facts. That’s fine. But engineering and science doesn’t work that way!  AI will continue to evolve and AGI is just a matter of time.  I attach a picture that makes the point. A stochastic synthesis of ideas as evidence that artistic sensibility can be reduced to neural processing.


> On 22 Oct 2023, at 05:38, Paola Di Maio <paola.dimaio@gmail.com> wrote:
> 
> 
> Consciousness is too huge a topic . Undecidable, too much can be said about without ever reaching any conclusion, possibly because no single theory or point of view can exhaust the subject. However
> I d like to suggest simply that it is tackled only in relation to AI KR. Surely. consciousness is relevant to AI and to KR discussion and potential standards. We should keep that in mind where possible and parsimoniously limit our considerations accordingly
> 
> I ll leave it to Carl to liaise with the WoT group, since he is a member there and brought up the subject.
> I ll work on tidying up some of the resources shared on the list into some form of coherent narrative when I can, that is my next task

Dave Raggett <dsr@w3.org>