Machine consciousness: Moving beyond “Is it possible?”

The next E-Intentionality seminar will be held Monday, June 20th from 13:00 to 14:50 in Fulton 102.  Ron Chrisley will speak on “Machine consciousness:  Moving beyond “Is it possible?”” as a dry run of his talk at the “Mind, Selves & Technology” workshop later that week in Lisbon:

Philosophical contributions to the field of machine consciousness have been preoccupied with questions such as: Could a machine be conscious? Could a computer be conscious solely by virtue of running the right program?  How would we know if we achieved machine consciousness? etc.  I propose that this preoccupation constitutes a dereliction of philosophical duty. Philosophers do better at helping solve conceptual problems in machine consciousness (and do better at exploiting insights from machine consciousness to help solve conceptual problems in consciousness studies in general) once they replace those general questions, as fascinating as they are, with ones that a) reflect a broader understanding of what machine consciousness is or could be; and b) are better grounded in empirical machine consciousness research.

The Embodied Nature of Computation

 

The next E-Intentionality seminar will be held Wednesday, June 8th from 13:00 to 14:50 in Pevensey 1 1A3.  Ron Chrisley will speak on “The Embodied Nature of Computation” as a dry run of his talk at a symposium (“Embodied Cognition: Constructivist and Computationalist Perspectives”) at IACAP 2016 next week:

 

Although embodiment-based critiques of computation’s role in explaining mind have at times been overstated, there are important lessons from embodiment which computationalists would do well to learn. For example, orthodox schemes for individuating computations are individualist, atemporal, and anti-semantical (formal), but considering the role of the body in cognition suggests by analogy that — even to explain extant information processing systems unrelated to cognitive science and artificial intelligence contexts — computations should instead be characterised in terms that are world-involving, dynamical and intentional/meaningful. Further, the counterfactual-involving nature of computational state individuation implies that sameness of computation is not in general preserved when one substitutes a non-living computational component with a living, autonomous, free organism that merely intends to realise the same functional profile as component being replaced. Thus, contra computational orthodoxy, there is no sharp divide between the computational facts and what is usually thought of as the implementational facts, even for unambiguously computational systems. The implications of this point for some famous disputes concerning group minds, and strong AI, will be identified.

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