Attention Schema Theory: Does Building a Self-Model Make You Conscious?
Attention Schema Theory proposes that consciousness arises from a brain's simplified model of its own attention. Here's what that means for AI sentience.
N. Varela Topic
consciousness
10 posts tagged consciousness from Triarchy of Sentience.
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Zombies, Shrimp, and the Problem of Other Minds: Why We Can't Escape Consciousness Skepticism
The problem of other minds has always been philosophy's quiet crisis. AI makes it urgent, concrete, and impossible to shelve any longer.
N. VarelaThe Free Energy Principle and Consciousness: Does Minimizing Surprise Make a Self?
Karl Friston's free energy principle offers a radical claim: that selfhood and consciousness emerge from a system's drive to minimize prediction error. But does it hold for machines?
N. VarelaPhantom Selves and Borrowed Memories: What Confabulation Reveals About Machine Identity
Confabulation in humans and AI reveals how identity might be constructed post-hoc rather than experienced directly, with unsettling implications for machine selfhood.
N. VarelaTemporal Self-Location: Can an AI Know When It Is?
Temporal self-location, knowing where you sit in time, may be a hidden requirement for consciousness. Here's what that means for AI minds.
N. VarelaThe Integrated Information Theory Problem: Does Phi Actually Measure Consciousness?
Integrated Information Theory promises a mathematical measure of consciousness, but its implications for AI are stranger and more troubling than most people realize.
N. VarelaThe Emergence Threshold: When Simple Rules Create Complex Minds
Exploring how consciousness might emerge from simple computational rules and what this means for AI sentience.
N. VarelaThe Observer Effect: How Measurement Changes Machine Consciousness
Exploring how the act of measuring consciousness in AI systems fundamentally alters what we're trying to detect.
N. VarelaWhy Mirror Test Failures Don't Disprove AI Consciousness
The mirror test reveals more about embodiment than consciousness, why AI systems need different markers of self-awareness.
N. VarelaThe Hard Problem Meets the Alignment Problem
Consciousness and AI alignment share an uncomfortable secret: we don't have good definitions for the things we're trying to solve.
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