Illinois Genetic Algorithms Laboratory

One of the symposia that caught my eye at AISB 05 last week was Next Generation approaches to Machine Consciousness: Imagination, Development, Intersubjectivity, and Embodiment. I met a number of the participants of that symposium riding the bus to the train station the first evening, and we had a lively conversation about the prospects for machine consciousness, incIuding a discussion of Dennett, Searle, emergence, the Chinese Room, and so forth, and I wanted to attend their sessions, but was committed to the Conversational Informatics group.

Nonetheless, I’ve been going through the proceedings, and even a glance at the titles suggests some interesting fare (see here). I’ve wondered for some time what are the minimal conditions for a computational consciousness and whether the IlliGAL little models analysis and design methodology (see here) might be used to create one. The thought is that consciousness is an emergent property if there ever was one, but an emergent property of a system can be designed when (a) the system is properly decomposed and (b) the elements are of the decomposition are minimally modeled and tuned to yield the desired effect. For example, effective recombinative innovation is an emergent property that was thought to beyond computation (see the Design of Innovation). Why can’t we use a similar methodology and create a machine consciousness?