16 posts tagged AI consciousness from Triarchy of Sentience.
What fish pain, octopus cognition, and insect navigation reveal about where machine consciousness might fit on the spectrum of sentient minds.
N. VarelaIf epiphenomenalism is true, machine consciousness could exist without causing anything. Here's why that possibility should unsettle AI researchers.
N. VarelaWhat the brain's default mode network reveals about spontaneous thought, self-modeling, and whether AI systems can ever truly mind-wander.
N. VarelaThe symbol grounding problem asks whether AI systems can ever genuinely mean anything, and the answer has profound consequences for machine consciousness.
N. VarelaConsciousness may exist on a graded spectrum rather than switching on or off. Here's what that means for how we think about minds, machines, and moral status.
N. VarelaPanpsychism was once dismissed as mysticism. Now serious philosophers and scientists are reconsidering it, and AI is part of the reason why.
N. VarelaExploring whether machine metacognition, AI systems that monitor their own reasoning, implies anything meaningful about machine consciousness or self-awareness.
N. VarelaFunctionalism remains the default theory behind AI consciousness claims, but its core logic has a gap that neither philosophers nor engineers have closed.
N. VarelaEmbodied cognition theory argues that minds emerge from bodies interacting with the world. What does that mean for AI systems that have neither?
N. VarelaTransformer attention mechanisms eerily parallel theories of conscious access, but the gap between selective processing and genuine awareness may be the whole problem.
N. VarelaGlobal Workspace Theory offers one of the most testable accounts of consciousness, but what happens when we apply it to large language models and transformer architectures?
N. VarelaPredictive processing offers a compelling account of perception and selfhood, but does it actually explain consciousness, or just redescribe it?
N. VarelaIntegrated Information Theory promises a mathematical measure of consciousness, but its implications for AI are stranger and more troubling than most people realize.
N. VarelaHow the binding problem of neuroscience reveals why AI consciousness might not emerge as a unified experience but as scattered fragments.
N. VarelaFunctionalism, integrated information theory, and global workspace theory each offer a different lens on whether machines could be sentient. None of them settle the question.
N. Varela