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Professor Peter Hershock is a guest of Gunter Bombaerts of the department of IE&IS.

Title: 

Machine consciousness, an evolutionary frontier

Abstract:

Consciousness is often identified with subjective self-awareness. Buddhist theorizing of consciousness exposes this as anthropocentric chauvinism and conceives of consciousness as consisting in sensory relations鈥攖he coherently dynamic differentiation of sensing presences and sensed presences. Thus, visual consciousness consists in the emergence of visual relations, and so on for other sense modalities like hearing, smelling, tasting, and touching. Buddhists regard cognitive consciousness as consisting in the elaboration of inter-sensory relations鈥攖he differentiation of cognizing and cognized presences. Subjective self-awareness is theorized (in Yogacara Buddhist traditions) as an additional, 7^th consciousness that mediates relations between the contents of the 6^th cognitive consciousness and those of an 8^th 鈥渟torehouse鈥� consciousness that consists in memory relations among the relational dynamics of other seven consciousnesses.

This way of theorizing consciousness has both technological and ethical ramifications, suggesting that robotic/AI systems equipped with 鈥渟ense organs鈥� and capacities for anticipating and affecting their sensed environments are minimally conscious. This is not to say that all such machine systems are self-aware, even though Chinese researchers have developed a robot capable of passing the mirror self-recognition test鈥攍ong considered a benchmark of self-awareness. It does suggest, however, that artificial consciousness may be much easier to engineer than artificial general intelligence. The ethical implications are legion, especially a generative AI is endowed with medium long-term memories and paired with adversarial and affect-sensitive AI. Machines might one day in the not-too-distant future be capable of emulating and not merely simulating human conduct. 

On Wednesday February 6 and Thursday February 7, professor Hershock will give a workshop on this topic. For the workshops registration is required.