DO ARTIFICIAL GENERAL INTELLIGENT SYSTEMS REALLY

NEED TO BE CONSCIOUS?

J. Ignacio Serrano and M. Dolores del Castillo

Bioengineering Group, CAR - CSIC, Ctra. Campo Real km 0.200, La Poveda 28500, Arganda del Rey, Spain

Keywords:

Artiﬁcial general intelligent systems, Autonomous systems, Machine consciousness.

Abstract:

Consciousness has been studied for long time from heterogeneous perspectives and knowledge ﬁelds. In spite

of the great numbers of debates and the huge amount of work, the matter is still full of questions and even

enigmas at different levels. In addition to well known issues such as the evolutionary utility of consciousness,

the existence (or not) of the “hard problem” and the deﬁnition itself (to mention just a few), consciousness has

also been brought into the mind/body problem. This controversy has encouraged many researchers to tackle

the simulation and implementation of consciousness, thus giving rise to the so-called Machine Consciousness

(also Artiﬁcial Consciousness), which in turn motivates the inclusion of consciousness in Artiﬁcial General

Intelligent (AGI) Systems. However, do an AGI system need consciousness in order to be (general) intelligent?

This paper poses a humble reﬂection on this subject with the only aim of making the readers think about it

before starting working.

1 INTRODUCTION

Consciousness has been the object of study of many

research ﬁelds for decades (Seager, 2007). The ab-

straction level of such a concept, the philosophical

implications and the unavailability of empirical mea-

sures have made the research as appealing as difﬁcult

(Damasio, 2010). As for many other phenomena in

science, there is not yet a commonly accepted notion

of what consciousness is. In 1874, Franz Brentano

stated that“...there is no question of there being a

commonly accepted, exclusive sense of the term (con-

sciousness)... I prefer to use it as synonymous with

’mental phenomenon’ or ’mental act’ ” (Brentano,

1874). A century afterwards, R. J. Joynt claimed that

“Consciousness is like the Trinity; if it is explained

so that you understand it, it hasn’t been explained

correctly” (Joynt, 1981). Although many other re-

searchers have dared to ﬁnely delimit the boundaries

of the term (Rosenthal, 2009)(Antony, 2002) , there

is no common agreement and the object of what is

wanted to know is blurred.

From this perspective, intuitively, it does not seem

scientiﬁcally orthodox the attempt to physically (or

empirically) explain a phenomena from, let us say,

a partially arbitrary hypothesis. Nevertheless, is this

feature the one that determine the human nature? Is

there any conscious animal apart from the human be-

ings? Unfortunately, the answer will depend on what

is wanted to mean with being conscious.

In spite of the broad disagreement about the def-

inition of consciousness (Velmans, 2009), everyone

would accept that human beings are somehow con-

scious. Consequently, the design and construction

of an artiﬁcial system that is intended to be gen-

erally intelligent (AGI), that is, to the same extent

as any single human subject is, should include (ar-

tiﬁcial/machine) consciousness (Aleksander, 2009).

However, is consciousness coupled with human-like

intelligence? Is it an inherent requirement for the hu-

mans to carry out all the different tasks? Is conscious-

ness mandatory for the exhibition of human behavior?

Actually, there are other factors that seem to avoid

the realization of truly human-like intelligent systems

(McClelland, 2009).

The inverse case, out of the criticism, is the study

of consciousness itself by computational/robotictools

(Artiﬁcial/Machine Consciousness) (Seth, 2009). In

such a case, the research target is the conscious phe-

nomenon and the artiﬁcial systems are the method-

ological tools (Taylor, 2010). Even the use of an AGI

system for the study of consciousness is justiﬁed un-

der the hypothesis that consciousness emerges from

the immersion of the subject within a real environ-

674

Ignacio Serrano J. and Dolores del Castillo M..

DO ARTIFICIAL GENERAL INTELLIGENT SYSTEMS REALLY NEED TO BE CONSCIOUS?.

DOI: 10.5220/0003194906740676

In Proceedings of the 3rd International Conference on Agents and Artiﬁcial Intelligence (ICAART-2011), pages 674-676

ISBN: 978-989-8425-40-9

 2011 SCITEPRESS (Science and Technology Publications, Lda.)

ment that requires adaptation, multi-tasking and in-

teraction with other subjects. In such a case, an AGI

system is a useful tool that provides the closest-to-

ideal conditions for the study of consciousness. This

latter approach, far from tangle, could effectivelycon-

tribute to the development of the knowledge about

consciousness.

In summary,the big question is whether it is really

necessary to try to ﬁgure out a complex issue (such

as consciousness) by means of a technological patch

just in order for a machine to seem to behave as a hu-

man being (in Turing terms) (Harnad, 2006). Next,

some of the motivations for a positive answer to the

question are exposed and refuted.

2 BECAUSE OF THE

EVOLUTIONARY ADAPTIVE

VALUE

One might consequently think that if the ’conscious’

human has successfully survived and remained until

nowadays, consciousness must have taken a critical

part in such an achievement. Following this line, an

AGI system should reasonably include a conscious-

ness mechanism in order for the system to collect the

intrinsic human nature accumulated through the evo-

lutionary history. This way, the AGI system would be

closer to the human referent and, in turn, to the ﬁnal

aim.

According to Harnad (Harnad, 2001), the conse-

quences of adaptation are the consequences of the

function. Therefore, a different feature (variation in

Darwin’s terms) that does not produce a different

function is not a proﬁtable feature for adaptation. Be-

sides, there is no reason to deny that human beings

could have reached the same level of adaptation by

means of the same consciousless internal mechanism

(Humphrey, 2006). That is, there is no functional dif-

ference between doing a task consciously or doing the

same task without consciousness (imagine a plane in

auto pilot or human pilot). Therefore, it might be

enough for an AGI system to be provided with the

capability to carry out the same functions that have

made the human beings ﬁnely adapt and proliferate,

regardless of consciousness.

Note that this is not a criticism against technological

solutions or methodologies.

3 BECAUSE OF THE HUMAN

PERFORMANCE

APPEARANCE

It is commonly intended for an AGI system to interact

with and be immersed in the environment. This en-

vironment include, of course, other human subjects.

Thus, in order for an AGI system to success it has to

be accepted (or recognized) by the other subjects as

one of them. Consciousness might seem the key for

this question if human nature is supposed to be exhib-

ited by conscious processes. However, consciousness

is not required to behave as a human being. For in-

stance, an artiﬁcial (consciousless) system that pases

the Turing Test (Harnad, 2006) is considered to be

human by other human judge. In addition, a human

(’conscious’) subject might behave ’unconsciously’,

as showed by the Chinese Room argument (Damper,

2004). In conclusion, behavior does not necessarily

imply consciousness, and behavior (as well as physi-

cal appearance) is what make subjects suppose the hu-

man nature of other subjects. After this assignment,

consciousness is attributed by default either actually

present or not.

4 BECAUSE OF THE HUMAN

SINGULARITY

Under the assumption that consciousness is the qual-

ity that distinguishes humans from other animals,

an AGI must implement consciousness for reaching

human-level intelligence. However, consciousness is

not only present in human beings. Many studies have

pointed out the existence of the notion of conscious-

ness in mammals such as elephants, dolphins and

many kinds of primates, mainly derivedfrom the pres-

ence of shared brain structures that are thought to pro-

duce the conscious behavior both in humans and an-

imals (Baars, 2005). Moreover, other simpler brains

such as birds have also shown conscious processing

(Beshkar, 2008). Therefore, the implementation of

consciousness in an artiﬁcial system does not guaran-

tee a human-level performance, but just a vertebrate-

level performance.

DO ARTIFICIAL GENERAL INTELLIGENT SYSTEMS REALLY NEED TO BE CONSCIOUS?

675

5 BECAUSE OF THE

GENERALITY AND

UNIVERSALITY

Since an AGI system should be given with all the ca-

pabilities that the intelligent human beings actually

own, and every subject would accept that humans are

conscious, the AGI system must include such a fea-

ture. However, while most human subjects (except

impaired or people with disorders) can accomplish

the same tasks with similar performance (in the ab-

sence of training), consciousness is different and par-

ticular for each individual. Consciousness is not in-

nate

. It emerges during development so it is affected

by the context and the stimuli for each individual (Ze-

lazo, 2003). Besides, consciousness is not universal,

it differs among cultures and even civilizations (Ear-

ley, 2002). So, when an AGI systems incorporates a

consciousness mechanism this should be a particular

one different from other artiﬁcial systems. This mech-

anism should also evolve so that it can be modulated

by context and culture. Consciousness is not therefore

a general mechanism (in functional terms).

6 CONCLUSIONS

The problem of consciousness can be considered

among the most controversial within the “Hard” Ar-

tiﬁcial Intelligence (AI). It implies a lot of considera-

tions from differentperspectivesand knowledge ﬁelds

(Damasio, 2010), to the extent that its own existence

is even questioned. A lot of hard and rigorous work

must be carefully carried out to get closer and closer

to the solution of the problem. Rush and na¨ıve ap-

proaches might introduce noise and blur the matter

even more than it actually is. The position exposed

in this paper claims for avoiding such attempts when

there is no reasonable need for it. This might be the

case of the implementation of consciousness mech-

anisms in AGI systems, which do not require con-

sciousness as mandatory to achieve their goals, that is,

to be generally intelligent and more human-like (Har-

nad, 2003)(McClelland, 2009).

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