Machine consciousness by Steve Torrance
It is suggested that some limitations of current designs for medical AI systems (be they autonomo... more It is suggested that some limitations of current designs for medical AI systems (be they autonomous or advisory) stem from the failure of those designs to address issues of artificial (or machine) consciousness. Consciousness would appear to play a key role in the expertise, particularly the moral expertise, of human medical agents, including, for example, autonomous weighting of options in (e.g.,) diagnosis; planning treatment; use of imaginative creativity to generate courses of action; sensorimotor flexibility and sensitivity; empathetic and morally appropriate responsiveness; and so on. Thus, it is argued, a plausible design constraint for a successful ethical machine medical or care agent is for it to at least model, if not reproduce, relevant aspects of consciousness and associated abilities. In order to provide theoretical grounding for such an enterprise we examine some key philosophical issues that concern the machine modelling of consciousness and ethics, and we show how questions relating to the first research goal are relevant to medical machine ethics. We believe that this will overcome a blanket skepticism concerning the relevance of understanding consciousness, to the design and construction of artificial ethical agents for medical or care contexts. It is thus argued that it would be prudent for designers of MME agents to reflect on issues to do with consciousness and medical (moral) expertise; to become more aware of relevant research in the field of machine consciousness; and to incorporate insights gained from these efforts into their designs.
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Abstract A spate of recent international workshops have demonstrated that machine consciousness i... more Abstract A spate of recent international workshops have demonstrated that machine consciousness is a swiftly emerging field of international presence. Independently, there have been several new developments in cognitive science and consciousness studies concerning the nature of experience and how it may best be investigated.
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Readers of this Journal are used to considering questions to do with consciousness and subjectivi... more Readers of this Journal are used to considering questions to do with consciousness and subjectivity in humans and other natural creatures. However it is instructive to devote some attention to the realm of artificial subjectivity—as a bare possibility, even if not as a likelihood in the near future.
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While the recent special issue of JCS on machine consciousness (Volume 14, Issue 7) was in prepar... more While the recent special issue of JCS on machine consciousness (Volume 14, Issue 7) was in preparation, a collection of papers on the same topic, entitled Artificial Consciousness and edited by Antonio Chella and Riccardo Manzotti, was published. The editors of the JCS special issue, Ron Chrisley, Robert Clowes and Steve Torrance, thought it would be a timely and productive move to have authors of papers in their collection review the papers in the Chella and Manzotti book, and include these reviews in the special issue of the journal. Eight of the JCS authors (plus Uziel Awret) volunteered to review one or more of the fifteen papers in Artificial Consciousness; these individual reviews were then collected together with a minimal amount of editing to produce a seamless chapter-by-chapter review of the entire book. Because the number and length of contributions to the JCS issue was greater than expected, the collective review of Artificial Consciousness had to be omitted, but here at last it is. Each paper’s review is written by a single author, so any comments made may not reflect the opinions of all nine of the joint authors!
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Articles by Steve Torrance
Humana.Mente, 2011
An inter-enactive approach to agency holds that the behaviour of agents in a social situation unf... more An inter-enactive approach to agency holds that the behaviour of agents in a social situation unfolds not only according to their individual abilities and goals, but also according to the conditions and constraints imposed by the autonomous dynamics of the interaction process itself. We illustrate this position with examples drawn from phenomenological observations and dynamical systems models. On the basis of these examples we discuss some of the implications of this inter-enactive approach to agency for our understanding of social phenomena in a broader sense, and how the inter-enactive account provided here has to be taken alongside a theory of larger-scale social processes.
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Machine consciousness by Steve Torrance
Articles by Steve Torrance