CONSCIOUSNESS OR CONSCIOUSNESSES? MODELING FOR DISENTANGLING

Abstract

After discussing a possible contradiction in Sloman's very challenging intervention, I stress the need for not identifying "consciousness" with phenomenal consciousness and with the "qualia" problem. I claim that it is necessary to distinguish different forms and functions of "consciousness" and to explicitly model them, also by exploiting the specific advantage of AI: to make experiments impossible in nature, by separating what cannot be separated in human behavior/mind. As for phenomenal consciousness, one should first be able to model what it means to have a "body" and to "feel" it.