Machine Consciousness: A Modern Approach

The purpose of this tutorial is to offer an overview of the theoretical and empirical issues in artificial consciousness. Is it possible to devise, project and build a conscious machine? What are the theoretical challenges? What are the technical difficulties? What is the relation between cognition and consciousness? The most promising models will be sketched and contrasted: Global Work Space, Tononi’s information integration, Embodied Cognition, Externalist approaches, bio-inspired cognitive architectures. Questions to be discussed include: What advantage does consciousness provide? Is conscious experience the hallmark of a special style of information processing? Would conscious machines be able to outperform intelligent machines?