User:Ataturk/ac

An artificial consciousness (AC) system is an artifact capable of achieving verifiable aspects of consciousness.

Consciousness is sometimes defined as self-awareness. Self-awareness is a subjective characteristic which may be difficult to test. Other measures may be easier. For example: Recent work in measuring the consciousness of the fly has determined it manifests aspects of attention which equate to those of a human at the neurological level, and, if attention is deemed a necessary pre-requisite for consciousness, then the fly is claimed to have a lot going for it.

Schools of Thought
There are a number of schools of thought when it comes to artificial consciousness.

Weak AC
One school of thought is that artificial consciousness will never be real consciousness, but merely an approximation to it, a mimicing of something which only human beings (or maybe other sentient beings) can truly experience or manifest. This is the Weak AC which corresponds to Weak AI.

Strong AC
The other school of thought is that artificial consciousness is (or will be should it ever be realised) real consciousness which just happens not to have arisen naturally. It is the analogue of Strong AI. One argument for Strong AC is that something that says it is conscious and which acts as if it were conscious must be considered properly conscious. Otherwise the consciousness of humans other than oneself must also be doubted.

The human nature of artificial consciousness
There are strong differences of opinion on whether artificial consciousness need be like human consciousness. Those who believe that consciousness will always be human-like do so because they do not think we can build anything else or because they believe that consciousness is not real and will simply mimic what we know) that the consciousness in them will never be more than a mimicry of true consciousness - tend also (but not always) to think that artificial consciousness, in so far that it is consciousness at all, will be human like. Test that these people devise for consciousness will be like the tests they would use to see if a persone were conscious.

Strange natures of artificial consciousness
On the other hand, if one believes that consciousness need not be like human consciousness Each of the Weak and Strong AC schools of thought are subdivided into whether consciousness need be human-like or whether it could be of an entirely different nature.

Mostly those inclined to discount the possibility of Strong AC also tend to think that artificial consciousness will mimic human consciousness.

It is asserted by those who think that AC will necessarily be like human consciousness that consciousness be measured against human capabilities.

For example, they think that one necessary ability of consciousness is the ability to predict external events where it is possible for an average human, i.e. to anticipate events in order to be ready to respond to them when they occur, because that is what humans can do.

The system must then fit that anticipation into an engine that factors it in with the other drivers of the artificially intelligent creature. Without telepathy, thought can not be known to occur anywhere other than in your own head, and yet you can know that an entity that you are observing is conscious. Therefore an artificially conscious creature need none of the intelligence borne of thought in order to be convincing, i.e. it can appear pretty dumb but still be considered conscious. Upon considering whether something qualifies to be called conscious, it may be that mere knowledge of its being a machine disqualifies it from a human perspective from being deemed conscious. Artificial consciousness proponents therefore have loosened this constraint and allow that a simulation of a depiction of a conscious machine, such as the robots in Star Wars, could count as examples of artificial consciousness.

Another area of contention is which subset of possible aspects of consciousness must be verifiably present before a device would be deemed conscious. One view is that all aspects of consciousness (whatever they are) must be present before a device passes. An obvious problem with that point of view, which could nevertheless be correct, is that some functioning human beings might then not be judged conscious by the same comprehensive tests. Another view is that AC must be capable of achieving these aspects, therefore a test may fail just because the system is not developed to the necessary level.

In the opinion of some AC must be capable of achieving the same abilities as the average human because consciousness is described by them in reference to human abilities. This reasoning requires AC must be capable of achieving all verifiable aspects of consciousness of average human, even if they need not have all of them in any particular moment. Therefore AC always remains AC, and is only as close to consciousness as we objectively know about consciousness.

As a field of study, artificial consciousness includes research aiming to create and study such systems in order to understand corresponding natural mechanisms.

Examples of artificial consciousness from literature and movies are:
 * Vanamonde in Arthur C. Clarke's The City and the Stars
 * Jane in Orson Scott Card's Speaker for the Dead, Xenocide. Children of the Mind and The Investment Counselor
 * HAL in 2001: A Space Odyssey
 * R2-D2 in Star Wars
 * C-3PO in Star Wars

Professor Igor Aleksander of Imperial College, London, stated in his book Impossible Minds (IC Press 1996) that the principles for creating a conscious machine already existed but that it would take forty years to train a machine to understand language. This is a controversial statement, given that artificial consciousness is thought by most observers to require strong AI. Some people deny the very possibility of strong AI; whether or not they are correct, certainly no artificial intelligence of this type has yet been created.

External Link

 * Dr J M Tax's web page on artificial consciousness
 * Proposed mechanisms for AC implemented by computer program: absolutely dynamic systems