Researching Synthetic Consciousness: sound appealing?
Without going into the philosophical or technical underpinnings too much, several individuals I know from a wide range of backgrounds—computational neuroscience, computer science, philosophy, AI research—have put together a project where we hope to put some real energy towards studying consciousness in synthetic environments.
Obviously, if this is an area of interest, you’ll likely have questions about whats possible given the landscape of consciousness studies, let alone extending that into non-human systems, but right now its nothing more than a group of individuals, being wrapped up into a not-for-profit research body who are;
passionate about the topic
keen to put some real energy towards it.
Have some time to give.
And hopefully push things along.
I’ve set up a very simple website just to collect some interest, but given the community here I thought i’d see if people were interested in being involved. As of right now, we have about 10 people committed to the project in various capacities.
We have some positions available that are a bit more clearly defined, are currently talking to some individuals who will make up the board of directors, and are hoping to run a kind of research fellowship program where we can put some real meat on the bones. The intake for fellowships will begin in about 8 weeks time (July, 2025).
If this topic, or doing research in this space, sounds interesting. I’d love to hear from you.
More details at https://alternativemind.org
I predict that—consciousness will turn out to be explainable with manageable complexity (by 2040, 90%) - the explanation will match observed behavior and allow decent predictions (like, which diseases or drugs will have an effect on it) - many people will dispute this and come up with edge cases and/or put on extra demands on what consciousness is supposed to be (but that wouldn’t change the predictivity of the theory of course) - the theory will allow engineers to build systems that are conscious in a recognizable way (by 2050, 85%) - many people will dispute this and claim those are zombies—some of the big systems will be ruled moral persons by at least a few courts (60%) - the engineers with optimize the systems allow smaller and smaller systems to be conscious in this sense to the point where they do little else beside being conscious (70%) - people will do all kinds of crazy stuff with this, maybe embed minimal such systems in devices to prevent turning off.