Artificial Intelligence and Consciousness

Consciousness is only marginally relevant to artificial intelligence (AI), because to most researchers in the field other problems seem more pressing. However, there have been proposals for how consciousness would be accounted for in a complete computational theory of the mind, from theorists such as Dennett, Hofstadter, McCarthy, McDermott, Minsky, Perlis, Sloman, and Smith. One can extract from these speculations a sketch of a theoretical synthesis, according to which consciousness is the property a system has by virtue of modeling itself as having sensations and making free decisions. Critics such as Harnad and Searle have not succeeded in demolishing a priori this or any other computational theory, but no such theory can be verified or refuted until and unless AI is successful in finding computational solutions of difficult problems such as vision, language, and locomotion.