Machine models of consciousness: An ASSC tutorial (part 1)

Last Friday (June 23rd), as part of the 10th meeting of the Association for the Scientific Study of Consciousness in Oxford, Igor Aleksander, Murray Shanhan and I jointly offered a tutorial on machine consciousness. I started with a discussion of general philosophical issues, the approach of Aaron Sloman and myself, and Pentti Hakonen's model. Igor Aleksander followed with a description of his axiomatic approach, a demo of his system in action, and a quick survey of the work Franklin and Baars, and Krichmar and Edelman. Murray Shanahan took the third hour with a description of his own approach, showing how it unifies the Global Workspace approach of Baars with the Simulation Hypothesis approach of Cotterill and Hesslow. He also described Holland's approach, showing the latest videos of his spooky robot Cronos.

Some general information about the tutorial can be found at http://www.assc10.org.uk/workshops.html#A1.

Media:

• PodSlides:iPod-ready video (.mp4; 40.5 MB; 47 min 25 sec)
  
• audio (.mp3; 21.7 MB; 47 min 26 sec)
  
• Powerpoint file (.ppt; 280 KB)
  
• "Virtual Machines and Consciousness" (.pdf; 232 KB), a paper by Aaron Sloman and myself from the Journal of Consciousness Studies, that is the basis of the second part of my presentation.