The Engineering Thesis in Machine Consciousness

Abstract

I argue here that consciousness can be engineered. The claim that functional consciousness can be engineered has been persuasively put forth in regards to first-person functional consciousness; robots, for instance, can recognize colors, though there is still much debate about details of this sort of consciousness. Such consciousness has now become one of the meanings of the term phenomenal consciousness (e.g., as used by Franklin and Baars). Yet, we extend the argument beyond the tradition of behaviorist or functional reductive views on consciousness that still predominate within cognitive science. If Nagel-Chalmers-Block-style non-reductive naturalism about first-person consciousness (h-consciousness) holds true, then, eventually we should be able to understand how such consciousness operates and how it gets produced (this is not the same as bridging the explanatory gap or solving Chalmers’s hard problem of consciousness). If so, the consciousness it involves can in principle be engineered.

Metacomputable

“…The claim that consciousness is meta-metacomputable, is going to be our fallback option when we get to re-formulate The Engineering Thesis in Machine Consciousness [8,9,11,12]. Yet, the claim that a machine is incomputable does not imply that it cannot be made and used by some procedure effective in operation.…”

“…The proposed view is not a double aspect theory, but rather "a triple aspect theory" that distinguishes among: (1) phenomenal content; (2) the carrier wave that holds this content (a bit like a stream of photons carries visual information); and (3) the non-reductive epistemic subject of first-person experiences. Such a carrier wave could be effectively engineered, via computable instructions given to a machine [9,11], even if the wave was incomputable. It is sufficient for the carrier wave of phenomenal consciousness to be metacomputable (constructible by a computable machine), or even meta-metacomputable, for the process to be effective.…”

“…One way to describe future developments of neuroscience is to view it as providing more and more accurate understanding of the computations made by brain processes. Those computations are of course inlayed in nature [8], they have to be performed by some physical device; they are instantiated in such a device [11].…”

“…Such non-reductive naturalism is able to navigate between the Scylla of mysterianism on consciousness and the Charybdis of reductivism. The claim that eventually we should be able to engineer projectors of first-person consciousness is a consequence of this approach [8,9,11].…”

“…Contra to most forms of computationalism, consciousness is not just such equations, like a weather front is not just its computational simulation [10]. Yet, once we have the equations that describe correctly and sufficiently the way first-person consciousness gets generated, we would be able to use them to engineer a stream of consciousness [8,9,11,12]. Like in engineering of an artificial heart, whose function we understand already, we need to inlay those mathematically-grasped functionalities in the right kind of matter [8], which is not identical as running them in a program.…”