Conscious Machines: The AI Perspective

Efforts to study computational aspects of the conscious mind have made substantial progress, but have yet to provide a compelling route to creating a phenomenally conscious machine. Here I suggest that an important reason for this is the computational explanatory gap: our inability to explain the implementation of high level cognitive algorithms that are of interest in AI in terms of neurocomputational processing. Bridging this gap could contribute to further progress in machine consciousness, to producing artificial general intelligence, and to understanding the fundamental nature of consciousness.