A report on Consciousness and Sentience

Representation of consciousness from the seventeenth century by Robert Fludd, an English Paracelsian physician

A cat in an affectionate frame of mind, by T. W. Wood (1872).

John Locke, British Enlightenment philosopher from the 17th century

Illustration of dualism by René Descartes. Inputs are passed by the sensory organs to the pineal gland and from there to the immaterial spirit.

Thomas Nagel argues that while a human might be able to imagine what it is like to be a bat by taking "the bat's point of view", it would still be impossible "to know what it is like for a bat to be a bat." (Townsend's big-eared bat pictured).

Neon color spreading effect. The apparent bluish tinge of the white areas inside the circle is an illusion.

Square version of the neon spread illusion

Consciousness, at its simplest, is sentience or awareness of internal and external existence.

- Consciousness

In science fiction, the word "sentience" is sometimes used interchangeably with "sapience", "self-awareness", or "consciousness".

- Sentience

6 related topics with Alpha

A phrenological mapping of the brain. Phrenology was among the first attempts to correlate mental functions with specific parts of the brain

Mind

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Set of faculties responsible for mental phenomena.

René Descartes' illustration of mind–body dualism.
Descartes believed inputs are passed on by the Sensory organs to the epiphysis in the brain and from there to the immaterial spirit.

Simplified diagram of Spaun, a 2.5-million-neuron computational model of the brain. (A) The corresponding physical regions and connections of the human brain. (B) The mental architecture of Spaun.

Computer simulation of the branching architecture of the dendrites of pyramidal neurons.

One problem for all epistemic approaches to the mark of the mental is that they focus mainly on conscious states but exclude unconscious states.

Consciousness in mammals (this includes humans) is an aspect of the mind generally thought to comprise qualities such as subjectivity, sentience, and the ability to perceive the relationship between oneself and one's environment.

Artificial intelligence

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Intelligence demonstrated by machines, as opposed to the natural intelligence displayed by animals including humans.

An ontology represents knowledge as a set of concepts within a domain and the relationships between those concepts.

A parse tree represents the syntactic structure of a sentence according to some formal grammar.

Feature detection (pictured: edge detection) helps AI compose informative abstract structures out of raw data.

Kismet, a robot with rudimentary social skills

A particle swarm seeking the global minimum

Expectation-maximization clustering of Old Faithful eruption data starts from a random guess but then successfully converges on an accurate clustering of the two physically distinct modes of eruption.

A neural network is an interconnected group of nodes, akin to the vast network of neurons in the human brain.

Representing images on multiple layers of abstraction in deep learning

For this project the AI had to learn the typical patterns in the colors and brushstrokes of Renaissance painter Raphael. The portrait shows the face of the actress Ornella Muti, "painted" by AI in the style of Raphael.

AI Patent families for functional application categories and sub categories. Computer vision represents 49 percent of patent families related to a functional application in 2016.

The word "robot" itself was coined by Karel Čapek in his 1921 play R.U.R., the title standing for "Rossum's Universal Robots"

The only thing visible is the behavior of the machine, so it does not matter if the machine is conscious, or has a mind, or whether the intelligence is merely a "simulation" and not "the real thing".

If a machine has a mind and subjective experience, then it may also have sentience (the ability to feel), and if so, then it could also suffer, and thus it would be entitled to certain rights.

Feeling

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Often used as being the same as emotion.

Sensitive, sculpture by M. Blay (c. 1910)

The word is also used to describe other experiences, such as "a feeling of warmth" and of sentience in general.

"Feeling" usually refers to the conscious subjective experience of emotions (see next section).

According to the Cambridge Declaration on Consciousness, "near human-like levels of consciousness" have been observed in the grey parrot.

Animal consciousness

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Quality or state of self-awareness within a non-human animal, or of being aware of an external object or something within itself.

René Descartes argued that only humans are conscious, and not other animals

Drawing by Santiago Ramón y Cajal (1899) of neurons in the pigeon cerebellum

Previously researchers had thought that patterns of neural sleep exhibited by zebra finches needed a mammalian neocortex

The Eurasian magpie passes the mirror test

Octopus travelling with shells collected for protection

In humans, consciousness has been defined as: sentience, awareness, subjectivity, qualia, the ability to experience or to feel, wakefulness, having a sense of selfhood, and the executive control system of the mind.

The Painter and the Buyer (1565).
In this drawing by Pieter Brueghel the Elder, the painter is thought to be a self-portrait.

Self-awareness

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Experience of one's own personality or individuality.

The mirror test is a simple measure of self-awareness.

Major brain structures implicated in autism.

It is not to be confused with consciousness in the sense of qualia.

The words "sentience", "sapience" and "consciousness" are used in similar ways in science fiction.

Intentionality

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Power of minds to be about something: to represent or to stand for things, properties and states of affairs.

Brentano described intentionality as a characteristic of all acts of consciousness that are thus "psychical" or "mental" phenomena, by which they may be set apart from "physical" or "natural" phenomena.

German philosopher Martin Heidegger (Being and Time), defined intentionality as "care" (Sorge), a sentient condition where an individual's existence, facticity, and being in the world identifies their ontological significance, in contrast to that which is merely ontic ("thinghood").