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This contribution examines two radically different explanations of our phenomenal intuitions, one reductive and one strongly non-reductive, and identifies two germane ideas that could benefit many other theories of consciousness. Firstly, the ability of sophisticated agent architectures with a purely physical implementation to support certain functional forms of qualia or proto-qualia appears to entail the possibility of machine consciousness with qualia, not only for reductive theories but also for the nonreductive ones that regard consciousness as ubiquitous in Nature. Secondly, analysis of introspective psychological material seems to hint that, under the threshold of our ordinary waking awareness, there exist further'submerged' or'subliminal' layers of consciousness which constitute a hidden foundation and support and another source of our phenomenal intuitions. These'submerged' layers might help explain certain puzzling phenomena concerning subliminal perception, such as the apparently'unconscious' multisensory integration and learning of subliminal stimuli. As a researcher in intelligent technologies, I have long been interested in scholarly debates about consciousness.

The latter will allow machines receive a cognitive ability which could even surpass that of humans. Technology experts fear that machines will end up becoming criminals, leaving human powerless to stop them. Dr. Ron Chrisley, director of the Centre for Cognitive Science at the University of Sussex, told Sputnik that while mankind is unlikely to face killer robots or rogue artificial intelligence taking over the world anytime soon, a human criminal in possession of AI-grade technology might be a much more real and tangible threat than some of us could imagine. "We need to be worried about criminals using AI in three different ways. One is to evade detection: if one has some artificial intelligence technology, one might be able, for instance, to engage in certain kinds of financial crimes in a way that can be randomized in a particular way that avoids standard methods of crime detection. Or criminals could use computer programs to notice patterns in security systems that a human couldn't notice, and find weaknesses that a human would find very hard to identify… And then finally a more common use might be of AI to just crack passwords and codes, and access accounts and data that people previously could leave secure. So these are just three examples of how AI would be a serious threat to security of people in general if it were in the hands of the wrong people," Chrisley explained.