This is the second of several short interviews on AI and agency. In the interest of our guests’ and audience’s time, the interviews will be brief, but each interview is supplemented with a reading list that allows readers to explore the topic in greater depth.
We are fortunate to have Professor David Papineau join us for this second interview. He is Professor of Philosophy of Science at the Department of Philosophy, King’s College London. His superb work encompasses a broad range of topics, from theories of representation, sensory experience, and consciousness to physicalism and naturalism, causality and probability, epistemology and realism. He is interviewed by Majid D. Beni.
Reading list:
Papineau, D. (2022). Swampman, teleosemantics and kind essences. Synthese, 200(6), 509.
Papineau, D. “Consciousness is Not the Key to Moral Standing” work in progress
Garson, J., & Papineau, D. (2019). Teleosemantics, selection and novel contents. Biology & Philosophy, 34(3), 36.
Godman, M., Mallozzi, A., & Papineau, D. (2020). Essential properties are super-explanatory: Taming metaphysical modality. Journal of the American Philosophical Association, 6(3), 316-334.
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It’s becoming clear that with all the brain and consciousness theories out there, the proof will be in the pudding. By this I mean, can any particular theory be used to create a human adult level conscious machine. My bet is on the late Gerald Edelman’s Extended Theory of Neuronal Group Selection. The lead group in robotics based on this theory is the Neurorobotics Lab at UC at Irvine. Dr. Edelman distinguished between primary consciousness, which came first in evolution, and that humans share with other conscious animals, and higher order consciousness, which came to only humans with the acquisition of language. A machine with only primary consciousness will probably have to come first.
What I find special about the TNGS is the Darwin series of automata created at the Neurosciences Institute by Dr. Edelman and his colleagues in the 1990’s and 2000’s. These machines perform in the real world, not in a restricted simulated world, and display convincing physical behavior indicative of higher psychological functions necessary for consciousness, such as perceptual categorization, memory, and learning. They are based on realistic models of the parts of the biological brain that the theory claims subserve these functions. The extended TNGS allows for the emergence of consciousness based only on further evolutionary development of the brain areas responsible for these functions, in a parsimonious way. No other research I’ve encountered is anywhere near as convincing.
I post because on almost every video and article about the brain and consciousness that I encounter, the attitude seems to be that we still know next to nothing about how the brain and consciousness work; that there’s lots of data but no unifying theory. I believe the extended TNGS is that theory. My motivation is to keep that theory in front of the public. And obviously, I consider it the route to a truly conscious machine, primary and higher-order.
My advice to people who want to create a conscious machine is to seriously ground themselves in the extended TNGS and the Darwin automata first, and proceed from there, by applying to Jeff Krichmar’s lab at UC Irvine, possibly. A link to Dr. Edelman’s roadmap to a conscious machine is at Jeff Krichmar’s UCI site.