On the link between conscious function and general intelligence in humans and machines
By Arthur Juliani, Kai Arulkumaran, Shuntaro Sasai, Ryota Kanai. 2022
31 citations recorded by the source corpus.
In popular media, there is often a connection drawn between the advent of awareness in artificial agents and those same agents simultaneously achieving human or superhuman level intelligence. In this work, we explore the validity and potential application of this seemingly intuitive link between consciousness and intelligence. We do so by examining the cognitive abilities associated with three contemporary theories of conscious function: Global Workspace Theory (GWT), Information Generation Theory (IGT), and Attention Schema Theory (AST). We find that all three theories specifically relate conscious function to some aspect of domain-general intelligence in humans. With this insight, we turn to the field of Artificial Intelligence (AI) and find that, while still far from demonstrating general intelligence, many state-of-the-art deep learning methods have begun to incorporate key aspects of each of the three functional theories. Having identified this trend, we use the motivating example of mental time travel in humans to propose ways in which insights from each of the three theories may be combined into a single unified and implementable model. Given that it is made possible by cognitive abilities underlying each of the three functional theories, artificial agents capable of mental time travel would not only possess greater general intelligence than current approaches, but also be more consistent with our current understanding of the functional role of consciousness in humans, thus making it a promising near-term goal for AI research.
Subfields: Cognitive Neuroscience, Social Psychology
How researchers see this paper
The researchers whose trusted networks rank it highest, strongest advocate first. Every researcher gets a different order.
In Cognitive Neuroscience
Citations in the corpus
- Task-Aware Information Routing from Common Representation Space in Lifelong Learning (2023, background): “In the brain, information is not always processed consciously unless there is sufficient activation in the prefrontal region, resulting in an ignition event (Juliani et al., 2022).”