Hi, it’s been a while but I’ve been working on a clearer definition of consciousness and thought I’d post it here. How a mind works is very important to advanced AI and to the possibility that we will advance to the Singularity.

I’ve also noted a wide range of concepts linked to the word consciousness. I’ve seen it used as,

  • magical soul
  • ability to recognize yourself in a mirror
  • the opposite of unconscious, that is, not being asleep or knocked out.
  • the ability to think about or be aware of yourself,

I’m talking about the last one. The next to last one defines anything from earthworm and above as a conscious individual. But I’m not sure even a dog can think about itself, other than being aware of it’s body’s experience. I will use the term “self-aware” to refer to this concept of self-aware consciousness. Without self aware consciousness in an AI, you get goal directed behavior but without the concept of ‘self’ influencing the decision process. It would still have goals, including self maintenance and any other assigned goals, but without self awareness it would not develop a concept of self and therefore, not have fear for self or desire for self gain. In other words, it would observe the world, function to obtain it’s goals (because it is designed to do that) and not be concerned with modifying it’s goals for self gain.

This concept of designing AI’s without self-awareness may be the crucial difference between a useful slave AI and an uncontrollable, self-aggrandizing competitor to humans. What is a human peer AI, but a human equivalent individual who would compete with us for power and resources? Given that humans often compete without following any rules, I would expect nothing less from a human equivalent AI. And I would not expect to win a completion with a peer class AI when that AI can morph it’s body into any shape, operate at much greater speed than a biological individual, and control it’s own pain and emotional drivers.

But, if the human equivalent AI is not designed to have self-awareness, it remains a functional mind but without the complexity of self concept to make it a human competitor.

How do you add or not add self awareness to an AI? Self-aware consciousness is simply the unconscious incorporation of previous experience into present experience. That is, the thing that makes us self-aware is our awareness of key elements of our previous experience. Such as kinesthetic body experience, sense of time, sense of location, memory of what we were thinking about, concept of who we are, what our name is, who we are speaking to, what goal is important at this time, etc. Those things that we know ‘now’ are unconsciously ( that is, without our knowledge or awareness of the process ) fed back into our present experience as an integral and subliminal part of our present experience. This feedback takes some time since our brains don’t deal with new information more than 10 times per second. So we get a 100 millisecond delay in this feedback loop. What we experience through this delayed channel is actually a copy of what we were experiencing 100 milliseconds ago. Which also contains a degraded copy of what we were experiencing 200 milliseconds ago. That’s why our feel of who we are fades away the further we remember into the past, until all we have are discrete memories of objective experience by way or short or long term memory. The consciousness delay loop is outside and separate from the short and long term memories. It is a hardware thing. You either have it or you don’t although I suspect that there are early versions in animals that are rudimentary to what we know as self-awareness.