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What we talk about when we talk about monads
Computer science provides an in-depth understanding of technical aspects...
03/27/2018 ∙ by Tomas Petricek, et al. ∙
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Levels of Abstraction and the Apparent Contradictory Philosophical Legacy of Turing and Shannon
In a recent article, Luciano Floridi explains his view of Turing's legac...
02/05/2014 ∙ by Hector Zenil, et al. ∙
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A Stronger Foundation for Computer Science and P=NP
This article constructs a Turing Machine which can solve for β^' which i...
08/18/2017 ∙ by Mark Inman, et al. ∙
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Defining Concepts of Emotion: From Philosophy to Science
This paper is motivated by a series of (related) questions as to whether...
02/11/2016 ∙ by Changqing Liu, et al. ∙
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Alan Turing and the "Hard" and "Easy" Problem of Cognition: Doing and Feeling
The "easy" problem of cognitive science is explaining how and why we can...
06/16/2012 ∙ by Stevan Harnad, et al. ∙
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The Computational Principles of Learning Ability
It has been quite a long time since AI researchers in the field of compu...
09/23/2015 ∙ by Hao Wu, et al. ∙
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The Quotient in Preorder Theories
Seeking the largest solution to an expression of the form A x <= B is a ...
09/23/2020 ∙ by Íñigo X. Íncer Romeo, et al. ∙
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A Theoretical Computer Science Perspective on Consciousness
11/18/2020 ∙ by Manuel Blum, et al. ∙
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The quest to understand consciousness, once the purview of philosophers and theologians, is now actively pursued by scientists of many stripes. This paper studies consciousness from the perspective of theoretical computer science. It formalizes the Global Workspace Theory (GWT) originated by cognitive neuroscientist Bernard Baars and further developed by him, Stanislas Dehaene, and others. Our major contribution lies in the precise formal definition of a Conscious Turing Machine (CTM), also called a Conscious AI. We define the CTM in the spirit of Alan Turing's simple yet powerful definition of a computer, the Turing Machine (TM). We are not looking for a complex model of the brain nor of cognition but for a simple model of (the admittedly complex concept of) consciousness. After formally defining CTM, we give a formal definition of consciousness in CTM. We then suggest why the CTM has the feeling of consciousness. The reasonableness of the definitions and explanations can be judged by how well they agree with commonly accepted intuitive concepts of human consciousness, the breadth of related concepts that the model explains easily and naturally, and the extent of its agreement with scientific evidence.
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