thinker:megan-a-k-petersMegan A. K. Peters
Authored papers (1)
No current AI system is a strong candidate for phenomenal consciousness, yet there are no obvious technical barriers to building one — this is the central finding of Butlin et al. (2023), a systematic assessment of contemporary AI architectures against 14 indicator properties derived from five neuroscientific theories of consciousness. The paper introduces a rubric-based, theory-heavy method: rather than relying on behavioral tests susceptible to gaming by systems like GPT-4 or LaMDA, it operationalizes indicators in computational terms drawn from recurrent processing theory (RPT-1, RPT-2), global workspace theory (GWT-1 through GWT-4), computational higher-order theories including perceptual reality monitoring (HOT-1 through HOT-4), attention schema theory (AST-1), predictive processing (PP-1), and agency/embodiment conditions (AE-1, AE-2). Applied to specific systems, Transformer-based LLMs lack the recurrent global broadcast architecture required by GWT, the Perceiver architecture satisfies GWT-1 and GWT-2 but lacks genuine global broadcast, and DeepMind's Adaptive Agent (AdA) — a Transformer-LSTM system trained via meta-reinforcement learning across hundreds of timesteps of context — is identified as the most plausible current candidate for the embodiment indicator among the three case studies examined. The working hypothesis of computational functionalism is adopted pragmatically: it permits inference from neuroscientific theories to AI substrates, while integrated information theory is explicitly excluded as incompatible with this substrate-independence assumption. The paper implies that deliberate architectural choices integrating GWT-style global broadcast, HOT-style metacognitive monitoring, and reinforcement-learning-based agency could yield systems that satisfy all indicators in the near term, making AI consciousness a near-term engineering possibility rather than a distant theoretical curiosity.
More papers — OpenAlex / S2
Affiliations (2)
- CIFAR Program in Brain, Mind and Consciousness(institute)
- University of California, Irvine(institute)
Co-authors (12)
- Axel Constant4 shared
- Chris Frith4 shared
- Colin Klein4 shared
- Eric Elmoznino4 shared
- Eric Schwitzgebel4 shared
- George Deane4 shared
- Grace Lindsay4 shared
- Jonathan Birch4 shared
- Jonathan Simon4 shared
- Liad Mudrik4 shared
- Matthias Michel4 shared
- Patrick Butlin4 shared
Their work is cited by (1)
Recent mentions (1)
- papers-typedbutlin-2023-consciousness.md