INTRODUCTION
You are invited to participate in an
International Workshop on Machine Consciousness, to be held in Hong
Kong on the 14th JUNE 2009.
The workshop is part of the Asia Consciousness Festival and will be co-located with the Toward a Science of Consciousness conference (to be held 12th-14th JUNE 2009). Among the many other excellent Asia Consciousness Festival events, workshop participants may be particularly interested in the Cognitive Informatics 2009 conference (to be held 15th~18th JUNE 2009).
The
workshop will explore issues at the intersection of consciousness
studies with cognitive robotics and artificial general intelligence.
Among the many important questions
lying in this intersection, are the following:
- What do contemporary theories of consciousness say about the possibility and nature of consciousness that may be possible in intelligent robots and software programs?
- Assuming machine consciousness is achievable, what are likely to be the similarities and differences between machine consciousness and human consciousness
- What can one say about the relationship between degree of consciousness and degree of intelligence, across the scope of potential intelligent systems including humans, robots and software programs
- How important is embodiment for the development of machine consciousness? How should "embodiment" be defined in this context?
- What are some contemporary robotics or AGI (artificial general intelligence) architectures that have the potential to lead so significant degrees of machine consciousness? Why do they seem to have this potential?
- Is consciousness (or advanced forms of consciousness) something that must emerge within a robotics or AGI system via the system's interaction with its environment, rather than being explicitly programmed in? If so, what are the conditions for its emergence?
- What implications do the social, collective aspects of consciousness have for the possibility and nature of machine consciousness?