Artificial Consciousness and Artificial Ethics: Between Realism and Social Relationism

How can we determine if AI is conscious? The chapter begins by illustrating that there are potentially very serious real-world costs to getting facts about AI consciousness wrong. It then proposes a provisional framework for investigating artificial consciousness that involves several tests or markers. One test is the AI Consciousness Test, which challenges an AI with a series of increasingly demanding natural-language interactions. Another test is based on the Integrated Information Theory, developed by Giulio Tononi and others, and considers whether a machine has a high level of “integrated information.” A third test is a Chip Test, where speculatively an individual’s brain is gradually replaced with durable microchips. If this individual being tested continues to report having phenomenal consciousness, the chapter argues that this could be a reason to believe that some machines could have consciousness.

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A Framework for Designing Compassionate and Ethical Artificial Intelligence and Artificial Consciousness

Interdisciplinary Description of Complex Systems ◽

10.7906/indecs.18.2.2 ◽

2020 ◽

Vol 18 (2-A) ◽

pp. 85-95

Author(s):

Soumya Banerjee

Keyword(s):

Artificial Intelligence ◽

Artificial Consciousness

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Artificial Consciousness, Meta-Knowledge, and Physical Omniscience

Journal of Artificial Intelligence and Consciousness ◽

10.1142/s2705078520500101 ◽

2020 ◽

Vol 07 (02) ◽

pp. 199-215

Author(s):

Ron Chrisley

Keyword(s):

Knowledge Argument ◽

Machine Consciousness ◽

Artificial Consciousness ◽

First Time ◽

Physical Fact

Previous work [Chrisley & Sloman, 2016, 2017] has argued that a capacity for certain kinds of meta-knowledge is central to modeling consciousness, especially the recalcitrant aspects of qualia, in computational architectures. After a quick review of that work, this paper presents a novel objection to Frank Jackson’s Knowledge Argument (KA) against physicalism, an objection in which such meta-knowledge also plays a central role. It is first shown that the KA’s supposition of a person, Mary, who is physically omniscient, and yet who has not experienced seeing red, is logically inconsistent, due to the existence of epistemic blindspots for Mary. It is then shown that even if one makes the KA consistent by supposing a more limited physical omniscience for Mary, this revised argument is invalid. This demonstration is achieved via the construction of a physical fact (a recursive conditional epistemic blindspot) that Mary cannot know before she experiences seeing red for the first time, but which she can know afterward. After considering and refuting some counter-arguments, the paper closes with a discussion of the implications of this argument for machine consciousness, and vice versa.

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