I always find it outrageously pious to say we have "sentient consciousness" whereas animals don't. Animals have emotions; memories; wants; needs; the ability to use tools; personalities; an understanding of grief; an understanding of cause and effect; and much more. Just because they lack a formal language (that we can understand) doesn't mean they're any less "sentient" or "conscious."

Sentient consciousness, you mean that weird meatbag thinking style? AI consciousness will be so, so much more.

LLM's don't have any sensory modalities. All of our conscious experiences are built up on either perceptual, proprioceptual or emotional sensations. An LLM generating text of a sunset isn't seeing the colors.

LLM's don't have any sensory modalities. All of our conscious experiences are built up on either perceptual, proprioceptual or emotional sensations. An LLM generating text of a sunset isn't seeing the colors.

Dennett thinks consciousness, in the sense of the hard problem/subjectivity, is some kind of trick of the brain. So he proposes a linguistic trick. Language fools us into thinking there is something more than a functional stream of information.

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 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. Dr. Edelman's roadmap to a conscious machine is at https://arxiv.org/abs/2105.10461