Consciousness - is it important for AI?

I’ve been diving into the current thinking around consciousness.

Turing sidestepped the question of machines having consciousness with the Turing Test - something that kept the question at a distance until ChatGPT!

The view that consciousness is from natural language and can be defined with natural language is one that does not sit easy with me.

In the video below Susan Schneider goes into some detail on that aspect, the personal benefit is that I’ve come to the view that the Hard Problem of Consciousness is not a problem as it does not exist. There is no separation between physical being and my internal monologue.

Micheal Levin poses some evidence that really speaks to me - firstly he talks about the physical process that has a high dimensional space and, secondly, he brings in this concept of memory -grams (iiuc the name) and the compression of how something should be.

There’s a comment on the video that talks well to aspects that are important to make a distinction on;

cognitive consciousness, the ability to discern and compute, and phenomenal consciousness, that foundational something that gives us the ability to be aware.

Which may be better defined by Ned Block with Access Consciousness (A-Consciousness) vs. Phenomenal Consciousness (P-Consciousness). There is a link to Tyler Burge that isn’t fully clear to me yet, however there appears to have been collaboration on Two Kinds of Consciousness in 1997.

The concept of Cognitive Consciousness and a distinct Phenomenal Consciousness sits well with me from a personal, experiential-based, point of view.

I have a rather pithy statement that language is a lie , it’s not as language serves a purpose in coordination and execution amongst humans and other animals that understand it. It is not reality though, another way of looking at it is the map is not the terrain or the data science version all models are wrong, some happen to be useful .

Language is also an excellent way at persistenting and transmitting information, we have a wide variety from concise Mathematics to evocative poetry - all beautiful in their own way but none are actual reality.

And with this I shall spend some time on Block and Burge.