Abstract
The purpose of the attention schema theory is to explain how an information-processing device, the brain, arrives at the claim that it possesses a non-physical, subjective awareness, and assigns a high degree of certainty to that extraordinary claim. The theory does not address how the brain might actually possess a non-physical essence. It is not a theory that deals in the non-physical. It is about the computations that cause a machine to make a claim and to assign a high degree of certainty to the claim. The theory is offered as a possible starting point for building artificial consciousness. Given current technology, it should be possible to build a machine that contains a rich internal model of what consciousness is, attributes that property of consciousness to itself and to the people it interacts with, and uses that attribution to make predictions about human behavior. Such a machine would “believe” it is conscious and act like it is conscious, in the same sense that the human machine believes and acts.
Highlights
This article is part of a special issue on consciousness in humanoid robots
We report a subjective awareness of making the decision
I will use the terms consciousness, subjective awareness, and subjective experience interchangeably, to refer to this phenomenological property that people claim is associated with some select events and information in the brain
Summary
The purpose of this article is to summarize the attention schema theory (AST) of consciousness for those in the engineering or artificial intelligence community who may not have encountered previous papers on the topic, which tended to be in psychology and neuroscience journals. The main goal of this theory is to explain how the brain, a biological information processor, arrives at the claim that it possesses a non-physical, subjective awareness and assigns a high degree of certainty to that extraordinary claim. Given a mechanistic theory of this type, my best guess is that artificial consciousness will arrive relatively soon, within the century, and that even farther down the road people will be able to migrate their minds to new hardware much like we migrate essential data and algorithms from an obsolete computer to an upgraded model. My hope is that AST will provide some initial insights into consciousness that are concrete enough, and mechanistic enough, that engineers can build upon it to facilitate the technology
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