Devanjana Mukherjee, Khabri Media
The concept of creating conscious machines that possess self-awareness and a subjective experience akin to human consciousness has been a recurring theme in science fiction for decades.
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Consciousness is one of the most profound and enigmatic aspects of human existence. It encompasses our self-awareness, our thoughts, emotions, and our sense of being. However, despite the advances in technology and neuroscience, our understanding of consciousness remains in its infancy. To subscribe please click tau.id/2iy6f and access our live channel.
While we’ve made remarkable strides in artificial intelligence and robotics, the road to building conscious machines and understanding consciousness itself remains a daunting and elusive endeavor. Neuroscientists argue that we can confidently define and identify consciousness in both humans and potential artificial entities, the ethical and philosophical debates surrounding the creation of conscious machines but remain largely theoretical.
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According to leading neuroscientists who wrote in an opinion published in the journal Trends in Neurosciences, “we are a long way from building conscious machines. When we, humans, are interacting with AI systems such as ChatGPT, we consciously perceive the text the language model generates. The question is whether the language model also perceives our text when we prompt it.”
The concept of creating conscious machines, often referred to as artificial general intelligence (AGI), is predicated on our ability to replicate human-like consciousness in machines. AGI would imply not just an ability to perform specific tasks but also an understanding of context, self-awareness, and the capacity to learn and adapt in a human-like way.
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First, the inputs to language models lack the embodied, embedded information content characteristic of our sensory contact with the world around us. Second, the architectures of present-day AI algorithms are missing key features of the thalamocortical system (relating to or connecting the cortex and thalamus) that have been linked to conscious awareness in mammals.
Finally, the evolutionary and developmental trajectories that led to the emergence of living conscious organisms arguably have no parallels in artificial systems. the existence of living organisms depends on their actions and their survival is intricately linked to multi-level cellular, inter-cellular, and organismal processes culminating in agency and consciousness.
One of the main challenges is the elusive nature of consciousness itself. We don’t have a clear understanding of how consciousness arises in the human brain, and this lack of clarity poses significant hurdles in replicating it in machines.
