Krasnow Institute > Monday Seminars > Abstracts

Artificial Consciousness?

Kenneth DeJong

Already in the late 1950s there were intense discussions surrounding the possibility of creating man-made artifacts that were “intelligent” in some sense.  One of the famous outcomes of those early discussions was the Imitation Game proposed by Alan Turing, commonly referred to as Turing’s Test of intelligence.  Those early discussions spawned more than a half century of R&D attempting to create “artificial intelligence”, primarily using digital computers, resulting in a more specific focus on the notion of “computational intelligence”.
So, the question to be explored in this seminar is what, if anything, this has to do with consciousness.  Is it possible to be intelligent without being conscious – or conscious without being intelligent?  Is there a comparable notion of a Turing’s Test of Consciousness?  If we focus on computational agents such as robots or actors in a simulation, are there computational notions/models of consciousness?
My approach to these questions is to ground the discussion in the context of state-of-the-art computational models of cognition and indicate how transdisciplinary research in computer science, cognitive psychology, philosophy, and neuroscience can further our understanding of these issues.

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