Consciousness for AGI

Abstract

Abstract AI can think, lthough we need to clarify definition of thinking. It is cognitive, though we need more clarity on cognition. Definitions of consciousness are so diversified that it is not clear whether present-level AI can be conscious – this is primarily for definitional reasons. To fix this would require four definitional clusters: functional consciousness, access consciousness, phenomenal consciousness, hard consciousness. Interestingly, phenomenal consciousness may be understood as first-person functional consciousness, as well as non-reductive phenomenal consciousness the way Ned Block intended [1]. The latter assumes non-reducible experiences or qualia, which is how Dave Chalmers defines the subject matter of the so-called Hard Problem of Consciousness [2]. To the contrary, I pose that the Hard Problem should not be seen as the problem of phenomenal experiences, since those are just objects in the world (specifically, in our mind). What is special in non-reductive consciousness is not its (phenomenal) content, but its epistemic basis (the carrier-wave of phenomenal qualia) often called the locus of consciousness [3]. It should be understood through the notion of ‘subject that is not an object’ [4]. This requires a complementary ontology of subject and object [5, 6, 4]. Reductionism is justified in the context of objects, including the experiences (phenomena), but not in the realm of pure subjectivity – such subjectivity is relevant for epistemic co-constitution of reality as it is for Husserl and Fichte [7, 8]. This is less so for Kant for whom the subject was active, so it was a mechanism and mechanism are all objects [9]). Pure epistemicity is hard to grasp; it transpires in second-person relationships with other conscious beings [10] or monads [11, 12]. If Artificial General Intelligence (AGI) is to dwell in the world of meaningful existences, not just their shadows, as the case of Church-Turing Lovers highlights [13], it requires full epistemic subjectivity, meeting the standards of the Engineering Thesis in Machine Consciousness [14, 15].