AI and Consciousness: Theoretical Foundations and Current Approaches

The Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence presented the 2007 Fall Symposium Series on Friday through Sunday, November 9-11, at the Westin Arlington Gateway, Arlington, Virginia. The titles of the seven symposia were (1) AI and Consciousness: Theoretical Foundations and Current Approaches, (2) Artificial Intelligence for Prognostics, (3) Cognitive Approaches to Natural Language Processing, (4) Computational Approaches to Representation Change during Learning and Development, (5) Emergent Agents and Socialities: Social and Organizational Aspects of Intelligence, (6) Intelligent Narrative Technologies, and (7) Regarding the "Intelligence" in Distributed Intelligent Systems. Is it possible to build a conscious machine? Is trying to design and build a conscious machine helpful to understanding the nature of consciousness? These questions have been at the core of AI since its beginnings.