Mark Solms and Mark Levin on Building an Artificial Consciousness

For a complete intro of these two guests, see their previous conversation. https://youtu.be/2vYfcotRRjk Timestamps 00:00 Musical Intro Affect is fundamental Unless we can make a conscious machine, we have not solved the hard problem Cognitive systems as predictive of the outside world 02:00 Mark Solms describes his project to create an artificial consciousness 04:15. The quest to find a neural correlate of consciousness (Francis Crick) 05:00 The wrong place to start 06:25 Children born without a cerebral cortex are still responsive and reactive 10:00 The mechanism of homeostasis, the periaqueductal gray, error signals 11:00 The architecture of the artificial consciousness 11:50 Autonomic regulation can be unconscious 12:30 Uncertainty triggers consciousness (ex: blood gases rising to conscious reaction), Uncertainty tells you how well you’re doing 15:00 Minimal conditions - self-organizing system - registers its own Markov blanket state (point of view) 3 needs 17:30 It needs energy, it suffers damage w/in tolerable limits, it needs rest & repair of structural damage - only purpose is to keep going 19:30 It wanders about is environment exploring and experiencing 20:43 An active inference agent, inferring its own state and state of its environment Error signals, updates, improving its model of itself in the world based on its 3 hemeostats Statistical confidence 23:50 Qualitatively distinctive categories 24:30 Calculating its expected free energy - the ability to look ahead 25:00 Equivalent of working memory, able to make decisions about how many steps needed to think ahead. 25:50 Create uncertainty by changing the environment. Its confidence in its policies is tethered to its affect. Environment changes & returns. Seasons. Explore and Exploit 28:20 How do we know when such a system has feelings? 30:20 Non-conscious is how we look at things that are in a different space than we are, but are they really non-conscious? Levels of “selfness” 32:40 Competencies in non-3D, problem spaces, transcriptional spaces, etc. In your virtual world is that level of consciousness as valid as physical organisms exhibit in 3-D space? 36:50 Measuring its own state in a qualitative sense Virtual v. Real agents Substrate v. Mechanism What new problems arise with embodiment? 41:00 Anomaly. Navigating morphospace Stress Changing set point. Rewritten the set point they gauge where to go. Second order monitoring system (metacognition) 43:30 We interact with our own representation of that state and our own internal bodily state The nerve impulses represent the state of a reality 45:30 The thermostat makes no resistance to changing the setpoint, but biological organisms need to resist, to monitor the set point. learning v being trained Has your set point been changed? Has someone else changed it? 47:40 The survival need of resisting change to your set point 50:00 Introduce other agents into the same environment to infer other agents. Isolation is a biologically implausible situation. 51:30. The problem of other minds 55:50 Zebrafish with hedonic condition place preference research See whether what motivates the entity is only a feeling. 57:30 Anxiolytics 58:50 Where does the desire to exist come from? "Affect is the fundamental (elemental) aspect of consciousness." Mark Solms There is an attempt to recast physics "to use the dynamics we use to look @ cognitive systems - a specific kind o predictive interaction with the outside world."