Thinking Through Consciousness

Consciousness is difficult to pin down. Most human beings go about their days with full and more or less uninterrupted consciousness, without contemplating their own (or other peoples’) conscious states. To be in the world, and accomplish great acts takes little metaawareness of consciousness, but in the study of consciousness our inability to think outside of our conscious states creates controversies at the conceptual and methodological levels. As Victor Lamme states (2006), even when we set aside the more difficult (or more poorly defined) questions about conscious experience to focus on finding the neural correlates of consciousness (NCC), we face immense difficulties (Lamme, 2006, p. 494). Experiments designed to find the NCC often involve the manipulation of conscious states through anesthesia, the study of sleep, or brain lesion studies (Lamme, 2006, p. 494). However, even in the case of anesthesia, where we can voluntarily induce a reversible altered state of consciousness there does not seem to be a clear dividing line between consciousness and unconsciousness with any of the processed electroencephalogram (EEG) signals (Guzeldere, 1998, p. 1) such that the conscious and unconscious states are still confirmed behaviorally (Lamme, 2006, p. 494). This leads to a problem, as it must be decided what behavioral measures \u27count\u27 as evidence for the subject having conscious experience (p. 494) a problem that is not so simple as the ability to speak and respond, as will be more clear in a later discussion of intraoperative awareness. Furthermore, Guven Guzeldere points to the difficulty of defining what the problem of consciousness is, within and across disciplinary boundaries (Guzeldere, p. 7). The problems that philosophers of consciousness, cognitive scientists and neuroscientists address when they study consciousness are not inevitably going to be identical, but are shaped by disciplinary perspectives, methods and technologies. Therefore, in this paper I am going to contrast two similar models of consciousness, Giulio Tononi’s Integrated Information Theory and Daniel Dennett’s Multiple Drafts Model, and evaluate them against the mechanisms of several anesthetics (Propofol, ketamine, and the inhalation anesthetics, including xenon), which will be summarized by a review of the literature. I have two goals in mind with this project: first, I have chosen two very similar models in order to demonstrate how small differences- such as Tononi’s engagement with the concept of qualia and Dennett’s deconstruction of it-- have large implications for what types of knowledge are possible when these models are applied; second, I am summarizing the literature concerning the study of anesthetics to show both that anesthetics are useful for the elucidation of the neural correlates of consciousness, and that there is a danger of conflating the neural correlates of unconsciousness with a full description of how consciousness arises, or what consciousness is. Moreover, I will argue that because Dennett’s model specifically addresses the importance of language in shaping human consciousness, despite the distance between his model and a full neurobiological approach, his model is more useful going forward. It must be emphasized that I am not arguing that Dennett’s model is the correct model of consciousness, but that he is thinking about consciousness in the right ways

The Singularity, or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love AI

Professor Stephen Hawking recently warned about the growing power of Artificial Intelligence (AI) to imbue robots with the ability to both replicate them- selves and to increase the rate at which they get smarter - leading to a tipping point or ‘technological singularity’ when they can outsmart humans. In this chapter I will argue that Hawking is essentially correct to flag up an existential danger surrounding widespread deployment of ‘autonomous machines’, but wrong to be so concerned about the singularity, wherein advances in AI effectively makes the human race redundant; in my world AI - with humans in the loop - may yet be a force for good

Prospectus, October 27, 2010

GIVING FUTURE GENERATIONS A CHANCE TO LEARN; The College Students Guide to Statewide Elections; Chuck Shepherd\u27s News of the Weird; The Perfect Soundtrack for Your Halloween Party; The Origin of Halloween; What Should You do This Halloween?; A Trend That is Taking Over Faster Thank Skinny Jeans: Kindness; Skinny Celebrity Chefs Can\u27t be Trusted; Zuckerberg Left With Plenty of Success, but Not Many Friends : Facebook Creator Shown as More than a Computer Genius in New Film, The Social Network; How to Stay Safe This Halloween Weekend; Former Parkland Instructor Wins Gold Medal; Nebraska Brings Tradition to Big Ten Table; In Search of Spiritshttps://spark.parkland.edu/prospectus_2010/1027/thumbnail.jp

On evil and computational creativity

This paper touches upon the philosophical concept of evil in the context of creativity in general, and computational creativity in particular. In this work, dark creativity is introduced and linked to two important pre-requisites of creativity (i.e. freedom and constraints). A hybrid computational system is then presented; it includes one swarm intelligence algorithm, Stochastic Diffusion Search – mimicking the foraging behaviour of one species of ant, Leptothorax acervorum – and one physiological mechanism – imitating the behaviour of Human Immunodeficiency Virus. The aim is to outline an integration strategy deploying the search capabilities of the swarm intelligence algorithm and the destructive power of the digital virus. The swarm intelligence algorithm determines the colour attribute of the dynamic areas of interest within the input image, and the digital virus modifies the state of the input image, creating the projection of ‘evil’ over time (evil is used here as excessive use of underlying freedom). The paper concludes by exploring the significance of sensorimotor couplings and the impact of intentionality and genuine understanding of computational systems in the light of the philosophical concept of weak and strong computational creativity

Understanding Consciousness as Data Compression

In this article we explore the idea that consciousness is a language-complete phenomenon, that is, one which is as difficult to formalise as the foundations of language itself. We posit that the reason consciousness resists scientific description is because the language of science is too weak; its power to render phenomena objective is exhausted by the sophistication of the brain’s architecture. However, this does not mean that there is nothing to say about consciousness. We propose that the phenomenon can be expressed in terms of data compression, a well-defined concept from theoretical computer science which acknowledges and formalises the limits of objective representation. Data compression focuses on the intersection between the uncomputable and the finite. It has a number of fundamental theoretical applications, giving rise, for example, to a universal definition of intelligence (Hutter, 2004), a universal theory of prior probability, as well as a universal theory of inductive inference (Solomonoff, 1964). Here we explore the merits of considering consciousness in such terms, showing how the data compression approach can provide new perspectives on intelligent behaviour, the combination problem, and the hard problem of subjective experience. In particular, we use the tools of algorithmic information theory to prove that integrated experience cannot be achieved by a computable process

Anticipation: beyond synthetic biology and cognitive robotics

The aim of this paper is to propose that current robotic technologies cannot have intentional states any more than is feasible within the sensorimotor variant of embodied cognition. It argues that anticipation is an emerging concept that can provide a bridge between both the deepest philosophical theories about the nature of life and cognition and the empirical biological and cognitive sciences steeped in reductionist and Newtonian conceptions of causality. The paper advocates that in order to move forward, cognitive robotics needs to embrace new platforms and a conceptual framework that will enable it to pursue, in a meaningful way, questions about autonomy and purposeful behaviour. We suggest that hybrid systems, part robotic and part cultures of neurones, offer experimental platforms where different dimensions of enactivism (sensorimotor, constitutive foundations of biological autonomy, including anticipation), and their relative contributions to cognition, can be investigated in an integrated way. A careful progression, mindful to the deep philosophical concerns but also respecting empirical evidence, will ultimately lead towards unifying theoretical and empirical biological sciences and may offer advancement where reductionist sciences have been so far faltering

Artificial Intelligence and the Body: Dreyfus, Bickhard, and the Future of AI

For those who find Dreyfus’s critique of AI compelling, the prospects for producing true artificial human intelligence are bleak. An important question thus becomes, what are the prospects for producing artificial non-human intelligence? Applying Dreyfus’s work to this question is difficult, however, because his work is so thoroughly human-centered. Granting Dreyfus that the body is fundamental to intelligence, how are we to conceive of non-human bodies? In this paper, I argue that bringing Dreyfus’s work into conversation with the work of Mark Bickhard offers a way of answering this question, and I try to suggest what doing so means for AI research

Organizational Posthumanism

Building on existing forms of critical, cultural, biopolitical, and sociopolitical posthumanism, in this text a new framework is developed for understanding and guiding the forces of technologization and posthumanization that are reshaping contemporary organizations. This ‘organizational posthumanism’ is an approach to analyzing, creating, and managing organizations that employs a post-dualistic and post-anthropocentric perspective and which recognizes that emerging technologies will increasingly transform the kinds of members, structures, systems, processes, physical and virtual spaces, and external ecosystems that are available for organizations to utilize. It is argued that this posthumanizing technologization of organizations will especially be driven by developments in three areas: 1) technologies for human augmentation and enhancement, including many forms of neuroprosthetics and genetic engineering; 2) technologies for synthetic agency, including robotics, artificial intelligence, and artificial life; and 3) technologies for digital-physical ecosystems and networks that create the environments within which and infrastructure through which human and artificial agents will interact. Drawing on a typology of contemporary posthumanism, organizational posthumanism is shown to be a hybrid form of posthumanism that combines both analytic, synthetic, theoretical, and practical elements. Like analytic forms of posthumanism, organizational posthumanism recognizes the extent to which posthumanization has already transformed businesses and other organizations; it thus occupies itself with understanding organizations as they exist today and developing strategies and best practices for responding to the forces of posthumanization. On the other hand, like synthetic forms of posthumanism, organizational posthumanism anticipates the fact that intensifying and accelerating processes of posthumanization will create future realities quite different from those seen today; it thus attempts to develop conceptual schemas to account for such potential developments, both as a means of expanding our theoretical knowledge of organizations and of enhancing the ability of contemporary organizational stakeholders to conduct strategic planning for a radically posthumanized long-term future