Is artificial consciousness achievable? Lessons from the human brain

TL;DR

This paper examines the potential for artificial consciousness by analyzing the human brain's structure and function, suggesting that AI development can benefit from neuroscience insights despite inherent limitations.

Contribution

It provides an evolutionary perspective on consciousness, highlighting brain features essential for conscious experience and proposing cautious, neuroscience-inspired approaches for developing conscious AI.

Findings

Brain features key to conscious experience identified

AI may develop alternative forms of consciousness

Caution advised in equating AI and human consciousness

Abstract

We here analyse the question of developing artificial consciousness from an evolutionary perspective, taking the evolution of the human brain and its relation with consciousness as a reference model. This kind of analysis reveals several structural and functional features of the human brain that appear to be key for reaching human-like complex conscious experience and that current research on Artificial Intelligence (AI) should take into account in its attempt to develop systems capable of conscious processing. We argue that, even if AI is limited in its ability to emulate human consciousness for both intrinsic (structural and architectural) and extrinsic (related to the current stage of scientific and technological knowledge) reasons, taking inspiration from those characteristics of the brain that make conscious processing possible and/or modulate it, is a potentially promising strategy towards developing conscious AI. Also, it is theoretically possible that AI research can develop partial or potentially alternative forms of consciousness that is qualitatively different from the human, and that may be either more or less sophisticated depending on the perspectives. Therefore, we recommend neuroscience-inspired caution in talking about artificial consciousness: since the use of the same word consciousness for humans and AI becomes ambiguous and potentially misleading, we propose to clearly specify what is common and what differs in AI conscious processing from full human conscious experience.