Consciousness: Drinking from the Firehose of Experience

Abstract

The problem of consciousness has captured the imagination of philosophers, neuroscientists, and the general public, but has received little attention within AI. However, concepts from robotics and computer vision hold great promise to ac-count for the major aspects of the phenomenon of conscious-ness, including philosophically problematical aspects such as the vividness of qualia, the first-person character of conscious experience, and the property of intentionality. This paper presents and evaluates such an account against eleven fea-tures of consciousness “that any philosophical-scientific the-ory should hope to explain”, according to the philosopher and prominent AI critic John Searle. The Problem of Consciousness Artificial Intelligence is the use of computational concepts to model the phenomena of mind. Consciousness is one of the most central and conspicuous aspects of mind. In spite of this, AI researchers have mostly avoided the problem of con-sciousness in favor of modeling cognitive, linguistic, per-ceptual, and motor control aspects of mind. However, in response to a recent discussion of consciousness by the well-known philosopher and AI critic John Searle (Searle 2004), it seems to me that we are in a position to sketch out a plau-sible computational account of consciousness. Consciousness is a phenomenon with many aspects. Searle argues that the difficult aspects of consciousness are those that make up the subjective nature of first-person ex-perience. There is clearly a qualitative difference between thinking about the color red with my eyes closed in a dark room, and my own immediate experiences of seeing a red rose or an apple or a sunset. Philosophers use the term qualia (singular quale) for these immediate sensory expe-riences. Furthermore, when I see a rose or an apple, I see it as an object in the world, not as a patch of color on my retina. Philosophers refer to this as intentionality. ∗This work has taken place in the Intelligent Robotics Lab at