=Paper=
{{Paper
|id=Vol-2287/paper22
|storemode=property
|title=Operationalizing Consciousness
|pdfUrl=https://ceur-ws.org/Vol-2287/paper22.pdf
|volume=Vol-2287
|authors=Don Perlis,Justin Brody
|dblpUrl=https://dblp.org/rec/conf/aaaiss/PerlisB19
}}
==Operationalizing Consciousness==
https://ceur-ws.org/Vol-2287/paper22.pdf
Operationalizing Consciousness
Don Perlis1 and Justin Brody2
1
University of Maryland, College Park MD 20742
perlis@cs.umd.edu
2
Goucher College, Towson MD 21204
jdbrody@gmail.com
Abstract. David Chalmers (among others) is fond of saying that con-
sciousness has no function; it can be there or not – it makes no difference
to behavior. In that sense, it supposedly is not like a pumping heart that
helps keep one alive. Here we argue to the contrary: that consciousness
has a critical function, and one that AI will be forced to deal with as
a practical matter, as we probe more deeply into realtime commonsense
reasoning. We will draw on a broad range of work – philosophical and
otherwise – in making our argument.
Keywords: Consciousness · Intentionality · Self
1 AI and Consciousness
The topic of consciousness tends to lead to two kinds of claims: positive claims
about what it is, and negative claims about what it isn’t. The latter include
Chalmers’ claim that consciousness has no function, no physical consequences
– it is an epiphenomenon [8]; and Searle’s claim that subjective experience (in
the form of intentionality) cannot be achieved simply in virtue of a system’s
executing a (formal) program [26]. Part of our purpose here is to examine – and
disagree with – both of these negative claims.
Positive claims attempt to characterize the nature of consciousness. These
include Brentano’s notion of intentionality [2] – that the mental is characterized
by its directedness toward objects of thought: to be conscious (i.e., in a mental
state) is to have thoughts (or feelings or attitudes) about something. Another
positive claim is due to Nagel: a conscious being is an entity that it is like
something to be [15]. This latter notion essentially characterizes consciousness
as having a qualitative subjective experience, something happening to and in
oneself.
So Nagel and Searle address similar notions of consciousness but with dif-
ferent aims: Nagel says what it is; Searle says that it cannot occur via formal
computational processes alone (and in part bases his argument on a Nagel-like
experiential character). And Brentano provides a functional role for mind (the
relation of aboutness between a thought and its meaning), whereas Chalmers
denies any such functional role.
We too seek to characterize consciousness positively, in terms of particular
processes. Nagel’s characterization is less useful here than Brentano’s. But the
2 Perlis and Brody
two can be regarded as taking similar positions: being conscious amounts to
having (internal, qualitative, subjective) thoughts and feelings, and thoughts
and feelings are necessarily about something. Further, it is a common view in
Buddhism that consciousness is “that which is aware of objects” – seemingly
combining the two (Nagel’s awareness and Brentano’s aboutness) [28]. So it
is tempting to consider whether a suitable subjective form of aboutness is an
essential ingredient of consciousness. The aboutness relation – as argued in [19],
[20], [21], [22], [17], [16], [18] – not only connects symbols “in the head” to
(usually) external meanings but also is a key role of the self: the self is what
“intends” to refer to Joe Smith in employing the symbol “Joe”. This will take
us on a somewhat meandering tour of various issues, from zombies to language
to robots to knowledge. Far from being a strict epiphenomenon, consciousness
seems to tie into a wide range of behaviors.
1.1 Zombies and Reflexivity
A philosophical zombie (or just “zombie” if there is no confusion) is a molecule-
for-molecule identical copy of a normal human, subject to exactly the same
physical laws and thus producing indistinguishable physical behaviors; but (by
definition) a zombie has no subjective experience, it is not like anything to be a
zombie [8]. The question then is: are zombies impossible? This is equivalent to
the question: is consciousness a physical process (i.e., something that performs
a physical function)? Chalmers has argued that zombies are possible ; we shall
not repeat his complex argument here (it is essentially based on the idea that
we seem to be able to imagine zombies), but rather present a counter-argument:
Suppose you have a zombie twin and each of you suddenly says “wow, I’ve got
a painful toothache and its getting worse.” In your case, this is because you in
fact feel that toothache; but the zombie cannot feel pain (or anything else). Yet
identical brain processes are occurring in both brains (by definition of zombie).
That is, whatever physical process led to your utterance also led to the zombie’s.
Thus your utterance cannot have been based on (caused by) your feeling the pain
after all. This is a contradiction, so the possibility of such a zombie is ruled out.
The hidden premise here is that when we make a decision to honestly report on
a pain (or other subjective experience) it is in part dependent on there really
being such an experience. To deny our argument is to reject this highly intuitive
premise.
But maybe subjectivity is an after-the-fact event: for instance, one makes
an utterance and then comes to feel whatever the utterance was about. In that
case, the zombie-twin might simply lack whatever (non-physical) competence
is involved in coming to have a feeling. This of course still flies in the face of
our intuitive premise and so does not seem much of an argument. But it brings
us to an important distinction, between reflexive and reflective notions of self.
Looking back on an event and then forming a conclusion about it, is a process of
reflection. Thus, I can reflect on the toothache I had yesterday. But my toothache
today is even worse. I am not reflecting on this but rather am reflexively knowing
the immediate pain itself. This is very easy to confuse. One knows one’s pain
Operationalizing Consciousness 3
reflexively, simply in virtue of there being pain (in oneself); it isn’t first there and
later (reflectively) known. More generally, subjective experience is experienced
(known) in and of itself, directly and immediately as part of being an experience;
there is no additional process that turns it into knowledge. The experience is the
experiencing of it – to have an experience is to know that experience.
But this sounds very strange. How can something be its own experience? 3
And yet this is close to the mystery that seems to lie at the heart of consciousness
studies. There is a “sense of agency” (discussed more below) that is part and
parcel of being an agent. When performing a voluntary (“conscious”) action, one
knows one is so doing; that knowledge does not arrive later on 4 . But an action
that is known simply in virtue of its being performed, will be complex enough
that it already constitutes a kind of (self-knowing) agent. While space will not
allow a thorough treatment of reflexivity, [12] offers a fuller discussion.
This may seem to be going in circles. But we are edging toward an unearthing
of less mystery and more practicality.
2 Operationalization
As noted above, an intentional agent will have its intentionality grounded in a
reflexive model of a self. Our approach to operationalizing consciousness is via
operationalizing intentionality, and this will mean giving precise enough defini-
tions of these terms so that they can be implemented. In this section, we will
report on preliminary work in both defining and implementing these concepts.
2.1 Enactive Minimal Self Models
A minimal self is roughly a minimal process which could be said to constitute an
aware subject. The details vary on what precisely this entails; see (e.g.) [22] and
[29] for two different but overlapping approaches to this idea. Our intention is
to model subjectivity in very short time-scales and ask what phenomena might
be constitutive of such; we explicitly leave out phenomena associated with more
reflective notions such as a narrative self [25].
Enactive cognitive science views cognition as something that occurs in em-
bodied agents which act on their environments; further this action is fundamental
to the extent that perception is itself an act and we perceive our world according
to our ability to act on it. Drawing on the work of Varela and Maturana[30],
some variants of the tradition further view the determined boundary between
an agent and its environment as the ground of meaning. As such, the tradition
3
It may be worth noting that the Mahayana Buddhist tradition has debated this ques-
tions vigorously, with one party emphasizing the paradoxical nature of any notion
of self-knowledge and the other emphasizing that this is precisely what constitutes
mental life [14]
4
This is of course not to say that one is only aware of what one is doing during
voluntary action; we thank the anonymous reviewer for pointing this out.
4 Perlis and Brody
offers a number of useful insights which we draw upon to develop an operational
notion of self.
We will focus our discussion on endowing bodily selves with senses of agency
and ownership and reflexive self-awareness. We have identified and worked on a
number of other essential features of computational selves, but omit discussion
of these in the interest of space 5 .
In accordance with the enactive tradition, we view selves as agents that act
in a world and have knowledge of themselves as such. Two fundamental forms of
knowledge will then be what Gallagher has termed a sense of ownership and a
sense of agency [9]. These refer to agents’ awareness that their actions are done
by them and that their body is theirs. For example, when I move my arm I know
that I caused it to move and that it is my arm that is moving. As our discussion
of Alice the robot below will illustrate, such knowledge is essential not just for
theoretical reasons but for basic functioning in the real world.
We would like to give these notions a formal treatment – this is useful because
it grounds the philosophical concepts. By specifying precisely what we mean by,
say, sense of agency, we enable an analysis of the concept and an exploration
of the role it plays in a computational model of the self. It also allows a set
of criteria against which we can test an implementation; if we argue that an
agent endowed with a sense of agency has particular properties then it will be
critical that any implementation meet our definition if it is to similarly posses
said properties.
We ground our definitions of ownership and agency in the neuroscientific
concept of an efference copy. This is a copy of a motor command that is thought
to be kept by an agent so that a prediction of the command’s effect on the world
can be compared to observed effects. For example, before moving my hand a
half inch left my nervous system might make a prediction about what my hand
should look like after the action is complete. Such forward modeling is thought
to be the neurological basis of a sense of agency6 [9]. Thus when a change in
my hand’s position corresponds to the expect effect of a self-initiated motor
command, I will have a sense that I moved my hand intentionally. Conversely,
a change which does not correspond to such a motor command will have me
looking for an external cause for my hand’s movement.
We generalize this story somewhat by allowing for a sense of agency to arise
from any kind of “full” representation of an agent’s actions with respect to its
body. Ideas in [4] and [17] suggest a representation of an action as a mapping
of the environment (as reflected in the agent’s sensory state) onto some internal
state so that when the environment changes the internal state will change ac-
cordingly. A straightforward example would be an internal image of the agent’s
5
Some of these are that a self should be: cognitively situated with a first-person per-
spective; reflexively self-aware; immediately self-aware in an essentially temporal way
and synchronically and diachronically unified
6
This need not be a literal copy of the command, but could (and arguably is) rather
some sparse representation of the command that allows for some kind of forward
modelling of the command’s effect.
Operationalizing Consciousness 5
body that shifts according to actions taken. If a single action (say rotating left
1 radian) has a consistent effect on the representation (even that effect is ro-
tating right one radian) then it will be a representation of the action. However,
notice that mapping all of our sensory information onto a single point will work
as well; our actions will end up being represented by that single point but this
representation is still consistent (if trivial). It is not particularly useful however,
so we also insist that as much information as possible be preserved; this can
be made formal by either invoking set-theoretics notions like bijectivity or the
concept of mutual information. Employing the latter concept gives a differen-
tiable notion that can be deployed in machine learning algorithms. It is worth
noting that some philosophers of mind (especially in the analytic tradition) take
representation as constitutive of intentionality [27].
We have implemented such senses of agency and ownership in two different
projects. The first of these used an analogue of efference copy to allow our robot
Alice to recognize when she (as opposed to another agent) is making a particular
utterance [7], [6]. When Alice initiates a speech act A, that fact is recorded
in her knowledge base, and her perceptual apparatus monitors what happens
for comparison with expected results from the success of A. Furthermore, the
monitoring and the performance of A are iterated in parallel over tiny time-steps
so that ideally there is strong covariance between the two. Thus as Alice speaks,
she starts to speak and hears her voice, continues to speak and hear, and then
hears her voice stop as she finishes speaking; and in all this she simultaneously
knows she is so engaged. Such behavior is not a formal nicety, but rather is
central to intelligence. Imagine that a robot hears the utterance “Can you help
me?” – it will be crucial to its proper understanding and subsequent behavior,
whether it takes this to be an assertion made to it, or by it. Note that [3] takes
a very different approach, in having a robot infer that it is speaking based on
recognizing the sound of its voice – not on direct knowledge of ongoing voluntary
activity.
Another implementation of agency and ownership used the ideas about rep-
resentations of agency outlined previously to force a deep neural network to
represent it’s own agency and body while learning to play Atari games [5]. This
resulted in qualitatively sparse representations (over all representations, not just
the feature trained to recognize the agent’s body) and improved game-play.
2.2 Self-Awareness and Self-Modifying Utterances
Agency, ownership and situatedness are fundamental properties of enactive mini-
mal self-models which are easily thought of in terms of lower-level, sub-symbolic
processing. Phenomenologically, subjects are also essentially characterized by
their self-awareness, and this seems better characterized in terms of symbolic pro-
cessing. Following Husserl (as relayed by Zahavi [31]), we take this self-awareness
to be grounded, reflexive and occurring in “thick time” (see below).
The temporal nature of self-awareness was analyzed extensively by Husserl,
who argued that awareness is not a phenomenon that unfolds instant-by-instant;
rather it is an extended but unified whole that consists of “retention, protention”
6 Perlis and Brody
and “primal impression”. Consistent with this view, and to avoid paradox, we
posit that a moment (of awareness) is not the durationless instant of physics,
but is rather an interval with small positive duration. This will allow actual
processing to occur, and corresponds to what Humphrey [10] calls “thick time”
and William James refers to as the “specious present” [11]. By allowing moments
to have duration, we are given the opportunity to have something like first-order
cognition and something like meta-cognition interact with sufficient resolution
to be interdependent; we are developing a ”diasynchronic logic” mechanism for
this based on the Active Logic formalism with a built-in Now(t) predicate which
gives agents an evolving representation for the current time [1], [23], [18].
We are exploiting the features of Active Logic to model an agent’s capacity to
reason about their own and others’ ongoing inferences in real time while unifying
these into discrete statements. Such agents will be able to reason with changing
circumstances and the logical consequences of their thoughts and utterances,
knowingly speak truly or falsely, and reason with “benignly self-referential” sen-
tences. In particular, such an agent can utter sentences which self-modify as they
unfold, potentially modeling the thought process of a person who is speaking in
Spanish, notices her audience seems not to be following, and switches to English,
saying (truly, and simultaneously knowing it) “I’m now switching to English.”
The basic mechanisms of diasynchronic logic are intended to model sentences
as 1) unfolding over time and 2) demarcated by a self-determined end point. The
latter property (modeled on Maturana and Varela’s notion of autopoiesis [13])
allows for logical sentences to be self-unifying – the sentence itself can specify
where it stops. The former property allows us to take some of the mystery
out of self-reference and ground sentences in their own logical values. And this
hints at a resolution between our view and Searle’s: special reflexive processing
at multiple and overlapping timescales may be the juice that pulls action and
perception, semantics and syntax all together into one self-interacting cognitive
whole. Of course, almost everyone who suggests an approach to understanding
consciousness seems to arrive at a point where some ”magic” is appealed to. But
we claim that our approach can be pursued at a practical – even computational
– level.
3 Conclusion
We are in agreement with [24] in that consciousness will become more and more
central to AI as the latter pushes deeper into the nature of intelligence. This
is especially the case regarding recognition and recovery from errors, which in
turn require a detailed and real-time representation of self. Thus, far from being
an epiphenomenon, consciousness is part and parcel of what it is to be intelli-
gent: reflexively knowing oneself to be engaged in ongoing processes (that same
knowing being among those same processes). And the nature of knowing will be
revealed as central and complex, well beyond a mere collection of data.
Operationalizing Consciousness 7
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