Consciousness in the age of mechanical minds by Robert Pepperell

【Title】 Consciousness in the age of mechanical minds

【Speaker】Robert Pepperell, Professor, Cardiff Metropolitan University

【Abstract】
We are now clearly entering a new age in our relationship with machines. The power of AI natural language processors and image generators has rapidly exceeded the expectations of even those who developed them. Serious questions are now being asked about the extent to which machines could become — or perhaps already are — sentient or conscious. Do AI machines understand the instructions they are given and the answers they provide? In this talk I will consider the prospects for conscious machines, by which I mean machines that have feelings, know about their own existence, and about ours. I will suggest that the recent focus on information processing in models of consciousness, in which the brain is treated as a kind of digital computer, have mislead us about the nature of consciousness and how it is produced in biological systems. Treating the brain as an energy processing system is more likely to yield answers to these fundamental questions and help us understand how and when machines might become minds.

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[atha]

Very interesting, thanks for sharing !

[martinwilliams]

You appear to be conflating consciousness with problem solving & insight, whereas consciousness is present even when not solving problems. I've come up with the idea of a panprotopsychic model where physicality is the protoconscious property, so action-reaction, input-output, cause-effect, stimulus-response are all different ways of labelling this property. Inanimate objects can have experience, whereas consciousness is meta-experience, the experience of experience, which is due to the transverse Hall effect of the Glial network, which is more sensitive to itself & the neurons (see "The Body Electric" by Robert Becket), this idea came about because experienced meditators brain waves become phased locked with the peak Theta frequency of the Schumann resonance, the most likely mechanism for this is the foresaid one. Glial cells operating on neurons equates to voluntary attention, whilst neurons operating on Glial cells equates to involuntary attention.

[dimaniak]

Consciousness is unnecessary for survival