Why does time feel the way it does? Towards a principled account of temporal experience arxiv.org/abs/2412.13198, from @renzocom.bsky.social & @matteograsso.bsky.social

Dissociating Artificial Intelligence from Artificial Consciousness arxiv.org/abs/2412.04571

Thanks to all the folks in the lab who contributed in countless discussions :)

I also want to call out two other recent preprints from our lab:

Matching measures the degree to which the environment triggers rich & varied experiences in the substrate. Matching should be high in a system that has adapted to that environment (if it can support consciousness to begin with).

– We introduce a measure of what we call the 'matching' between a substrate of consciousness and an environment

– We elaborate the implications on IIT for concepts of meaning, reference, and representation, and the connection between these concepts and evolution, development, and learning

… i.e., nothing external to the substrate directly figures into the explanation. This uses our framework for 'actual causation' (www.mdpi.com/1099-4300/21...).

In the paper:

– We develop a measure of the extent to which external stimuli trigger conscious percepts. This is important for IIT, because IIT accounts for phenomenal consciousness as determined by the intrinsic cause-effect powers of the substrate …

– How does all of this connect to evolution, development, & learning?

– How does our account contrast with those that invoke the language of information processing / encoding to characterize perception?

– What is the relationship between phenomenal experiences and stimuli that trigger them, i.e., how does perception fit in to IIT?

– What does IIT have to say about meaning, and what does this imply for the concepts of reference & representation in IIT?