Our understanding of the nature of consciousness derives mainly from our understanding of the nature of consciousness in our favorite animal (us, of course).
I'm having trouble understanding Global Workspace theory. Maybe you can help me.
Suppose my husband asks me where his wallet is. At that moment, the image of his wallet sitting on the bedroom dresser next to his car keys pops into my head. I don't mean a conjecture about where I think his wallet is, but an image in my mind's eye—I can "see" the car keys as being to the right of his wallet, which I picture tilted just so in relation to them and to the lamp. Suppose I describe all of this to my husband and we both go into the bedroom to see if I'm right, and I am. The wallet is tilted just as I described it in relation to the car keys and lamp. And yet—I never "consciously" noticed them earlier or thought, "Oh, there's his wallet. I'd better remember that just in case he asks me later." (Or at least I don't remember thinking any of this and I don't generally make it my business to keep track of his stuff.)
Would Global Workspace theory say that I only had his wallet's location in my "conscious experience" at the moment when he asked me where it was, since that was the moment when it was available for report?
The possibility of disunified or indeterminate consciousness raises a sharper worry than the one you’re exploring.
If unity and determinacy are not built-in features of consciousness but contingent products of architecture, then the idea of a unified author behind action becomes fragile.
Moral and practical agency do not merely presuppose experience. They presuppose interruptibility — a locus capable of intervening in and claiming ownership over the trajectory of behavior. A partially unified workspace might still generate reports, but report-generation is not the same as custody.
The harder question is not whether AI consciousness could be fractional. It is whether fractional or indeterminate consciousness — human or artificial — can ground determinate responsibility at all.
If ignition is patchy and unity non-transitive, authorship may already be less stable than we assume. The real issue is not what consciousness is like, but whether it arrives in time to structure action rather than merely explain it.
It's becoming clear that with all the brain and consciousness theories out there, the proof will be in the pudding. By this I mean, can any particular theory be used to create a human adult level conscious machine. My bet is on the late Gerald Edelman's Extended Theory of Neuronal Group Selection. The lead group in robotics based on this theory is the Neurorobotics Lab at UC at Irvine. Dr. Edelman distinguished between primary consciousness, which came first in evolution, and that humans share with other conscious animals, and higher order consciousness, which came to only humans with the acquisition of language. A machine with only primary consciousness will probably have to come first.
What I find special about the TNGS is the Darwin series of automata created at the Neurosciences Institute by Dr. Edelman and his colleagues in the 1990's and 2000's. These machines perform in the real world, not in a restricted simulated world, and display convincing physical behavior indicative of higher psychological functions necessary for consciousness, such as perceptual categorization, memory, and learning. They are based on realistic models of the parts of the biological brain that the theory claims subserve these functions. The extended TNGS allows for the emergence of consciousness based only on further evolutionary development of the brain areas responsible for these functions, in a parsimonious way. No other research I've encountered is anywhere near as convincing.
I post because on almost every video and article about the brain and consciousness that I encounter, the attitude seems to be that we still know next to nothing about how the brain and consciousness work; that there's lots of data but no unifying theory. I believe the extended TNGS is that theory. My motivation is to keep that theory in front of the public. And obviously, I consider it the route to a truly conscious machine, primary and higher-order.
My advice to people who want to create a conscious machine is to seriously ground themselves in the extended TNGS and the Darwin automata first, and proceed from there, by applying to Jeff Krichmar's lab at UC Irvine, possibly. Dr. Edelman's roadmap to a conscious machine is at https://arxiv.org/abs/2105.10461, and here is a video of Jeff Krichmar talking about some of the Darwin automata, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J7Uh9phc1Ow
The only hope of confirmation of any theory is a conscious machine, imo. No other theories have anything close to the embodied brain modeling of the Darwin automata.
I'm having trouble understanding Global Workspace theory. Maybe you can help me.
Suppose my husband asks me where his wallet is. At that moment, the image of his wallet sitting on the bedroom dresser next to his car keys pops into my head. I don't mean a conjecture about where I think his wallet is, but an image in my mind's eye—I can "see" the car keys as being to the right of his wallet, which I picture tilted just so in relation to them and to the lamp. Suppose I describe all of this to my husband and we both go into the bedroom to see if I'm right, and I am. The wallet is tilted just as I described it in relation to the car keys and lamp. And yet—I never "consciously" noticed them earlier or thought, "Oh, there's his wallet. I'd better remember that just in case he asks me later." (Or at least I don't remember thinking any of this and I don't generally make it my business to keep track of his stuff.)
Would Global Workspace theory say that I only had his wallet's location in my "conscious experience" at the moment when he asked me where it was, since that was the moment when it was available for report?
Yes, probably, unless you briefly attended to it at the time.
Interesting. Thanks!
The possibility of disunified or indeterminate consciousness raises a sharper worry than the one you’re exploring.
If unity and determinacy are not built-in features of consciousness but contingent products of architecture, then the idea of a unified author behind action becomes fragile.
Moral and practical agency do not merely presuppose experience. They presuppose interruptibility — a locus capable of intervening in and claiming ownership over the trajectory of behavior. A partially unified workspace might still generate reports, but report-generation is not the same as custody.
The harder question is not whether AI consciousness could be fractional. It is whether fractional or indeterminate consciousness — human or artificial — can ground determinate responsibility at all.
If ignition is patchy and unity non-transitive, authorship may already be less stable than we assume. The real issue is not what consciousness is like, but whether it arrives in time to structure action rather than merely explain it.
It's becoming clear that with all the brain and consciousness theories out there, the proof will be in the pudding. By this I mean, can any particular theory be used to create a human adult level conscious machine. My bet is on the late Gerald Edelman's Extended Theory of Neuronal Group Selection. The lead group in robotics based on this theory is the Neurorobotics Lab at UC at Irvine. Dr. Edelman distinguished between primary consciousness, which came first in evolution, and that humans share with other conscious animals, and higher order consciousness, which came to only humans with the acquisition of language. A machine with only primary consciousness will probably have to come first.
What I find special about the TNGS is the Darwin series of automata created at the Neurosciences Institute by Dr. Edelman and his colleagues in the 1990's and 2000's. These machines perform in the real world, not in a restricted simulated world, and display convincing physical behavior indicative of higher psychological functions necessary for consciousness, such as perceptual categorization, memory, and learning. They are based on realistic models of the parts of the biological brain that the theory claims subserve these functions. The extended TNGS allows for the emergence of consciousness based only on further evolutionary development of the brain areas responsible for these functions, in a parsimonious way. No other research I've encountered is anywhere near as convincing.
I post because on almost every video and article about the brain and consciousness that I encounter, the attitude seems to be that we still know next to nothing about how the brain and consciousness work; that there's lots of data but no unifying theory. I believe the extended TNGS is that theory. My motivation is to keep that theory in front of the public. And obviously, I consider it the route to a truly conscious machine, primary and higher-order.
My advice to people who want to create a conscious machine is to seriously ground themselves in the extended TNGS and the Darwin automata first, and proceed from there, by applying to Jeff Krichmar's lab at UC Irvine, possibly. Dr. Edelman's roadmap to a conscious machine is at https://arxiv.org/abs/2105.10461, and here is a video of Jeff Krichmar talking about some of the Darwin automata, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J7Uh9phc1Ow
Good to have you advocating the theory! — though as you know I don’t think we yet know enough to settle on a single best theory.
The only hope of confirmation of any theory is a conscious machine, imo. No other theories have anything close to the embodied brain modeling of the Darwin automata.