Abstract

This is a response to the nine commentaries on our target article “Unlimited Associative Learning: A primer and some predictions”. Our responses are organized by theme rather than by author. We present a minimal functional architecture for Unlimited Associative Learning (UAL) that aims to tie to together the list of capacities presented in the target article. We explain why we discount higher-order thought (HOT) theories of consciousness. We respond to the criticism that we have overplayed the importance of learning and underplayed the importance of spatial modelling. We decline the invitation to add a negative marker to our proposed positive marker so as to rule out consciousness in plants, but we nonetheless maintain that there is no positive evidence of consciousness in plants. We close by discussing how UAL relates to development and to its material substrate.

Highlights

  • This is a response to the nine commentaries on our target article “Unlimited Associative Learning: A primer and some predictions” (Birch et al 2020)

  • Several commentators believe that Unlimited Associative Learning (UAL) is not a good marker of phenomenal consciousness, suspecting instead that UAL may be a marker of something else, such as perceptual awareness understood in non-phenomenal terms (Masciari and Carruthers 2021), a new cognitive capacity rather than sentience (Irvine 2021; Godfrey-Smith 2021), or a set of attentional skills (Montemayor 2021)

  • We suggested that possessing all of these capacities was plausibly sufficient for having a capacity for phenomenal consciousness

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Summary

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This is a response to the nine commentaries on our target article “Unlimited Associative Learning: A primer and some predictions” (Birch et al 2020). We want to introduce one important new idea to supplement the ideas in the target article. This will help us respond to several of the commentaries. Ginsburg and Jablonka’s (2019) book, The Evolution of the Sensitive Soul, argues that the hallmarks of consciousness are interrelated and attempts to construct a minimal model (inspired by Gánti’s chemoton) of how they interact to enable UAL (see Ginsburg and Jablonka 2019, Ch. 8). The double-headed arrows represent two-way re-entrant connections between the units We will call this the minimal UAL architecture. A minimal global workspace, as depicted in Dehaene et al (1998) and reproduced here as Fig. 2, is a neuronal system that receives

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