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Artificial consciousness: a perspective from the free energy principle

Does the assumption of a weak form of computational functionalism, according to which the right form of neural computation is sufficient for consciousness, entail that a digital computational simulation of such neural computations is conscious? Or must this computational simulation be implemented in the right way, in order to replicate consciousness?From the perspective of Karl Friston’s free energy principle, self-organising systems (such as living organisms) share a set of properties that could be realised in artificial systems, but are not instantiated by computers with a classical (von Neumann) architecture. I argue that at least one of these properties, viz. a certain kind of causal flow, can be used to draw a distinction between systems that merely simulate, and those that actually replicate consciousness.

Relatedly, one could wonder whether the claim that particular self-organising systems perform approximate Bayesian inference can only be defended under a perspectivalist account of physical computation (see Dewhurst, 2018; Schweizer, 2016; for discussion, see Coelho Mollo, 2021). Butlin, P., Long, R., Elmoznino, E., Bengio, Y., Birch, J., Constant, A., Deane, G., Fleming, S. M., Frith, C., Ji, X., Kanai, R., Klein, C., Lindsay, G., Michel, M., Mudrik, L., Peters, M. A. K., Schwitzgebel, E., Simon, J., & VanRullen, R. (2023). I am also extremely grateful to Maxwell Ramstead for inviting me to present the paper at his Computational Phenomenology discussion group; I thank everyone who attended this session, in particular, Karl Friston, Alex Kiefer, Ken Williford, and Jeff Yoshimi.

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