Grant Castillou 24 July 2022

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.

Jim Johnson 1 22 July 2022

If the wave function collapses in the quantum state, why do some theorists believe that in our everyday "classical physics" world that quantum effects can occur? Like the many worlds theory?

Liam B 1 22 July 2022

I really enjoyed Helgoland by Rovelli, recommend the audiobook for anyone. The relational model is so elegant and compact I think it should be used to reformulate philosophical logic. It’s powerful enough to express quantum and does more than classic logic. As for the principle of the article, the “consciousness is needed” argument has to assume this division between humans and matter and is antiquated. All the quantum magic still exists in Rovelli’s view, but the whole universe participates in it not just human observers, and it lets us recover a lot of the realism that made classic science great.

ElizabethS 21 July 2022

Refreshing, and something of a relief - thank you both. It seems to be human nature to see things based on our own lived perspectives. We put ourselves in a special place in the universe. Within the framework of creation (itself a loaded word) the scale of man is very small. Yet we try to join the extremes of scale using abstract ideas. And consciousness could be merely a comforting concept. I ticked the 'I am not a robot' box! Thank you again.

Samuel Bebber 21 July 2022

Thanks for your post. I’ve been thinking about writing a very comparable post over the last couple of weeks, I’ll probably keep it short and sweet and link to this instead if thats cool.