Consciousness: Drinking from the Firehose of Experience

Book One

Volume

Proceedings of the AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence, 20

Robotics

The problem of consciousness has captured the imagination of philosophers, neuroscientists, and the general public, but has received little attention within AI. However, concepts from robotics and computer vision hold great promise to account for the major aspects of the phenomenon of consciousness, including philosophically problematical aspects such as the vividness of qualia, the first-person character of conscious experience, and the property of intentionality. This paper presents and evaluates such an account against eleven features of consciousness "that any philosophical-scientific theory should hope to explain", according to the philosopher and prominent AI critic John Searle.