Neuroscience and artificial intelligence work better together. Brain inspired is a celebration and exploration of the ideas driving our progress to understand intelligence. I interview experts about their work at the interface of neuroscience, artificial intelligence, cognitive science, philosophy, psychology, and more: the symbiosis of these overlapping fields, how they inform each other, where they differ, what the past brought us, and what the future brings. Topics include computational neuroscience, supervised machine learning, unsupervised learning, reinforcement learning, deep learning, convolutional and recurrent neural networks, decision-making science, AI agents, backpropagation, credit assignment, neuroengineering, neuromorphics, emergence, philosophy of mind, consciousness, general AI, spiking neural networks, data science, and a lot more. The podcast is not produced for a general audience. Instead, it aims to educate, challenge, inspire, and hopefully entertain those interested in learning more about neuroscience and AI.
https://braininspired.co/series/brain-inspired/
BI 099 Hakwan Lau and Steve Fleming: Neuro-AI Consciousness
Hakwan, Steve, and I discuss many issues around the scientific study of consciousness. Steve and Hakwan focus on higher order theories (HOTs) of consciousness, related to metacognition. So we discuss HOTs in particular and their relation to other approaches/theories, the idea of approaching consciousness as a computational problem to be tackled with computational modeling, we talk about the cultural, social, and career aspects of choosing to study something as elusive and controversial as consciousness, we talk about two of the models they're working on now to account for various properties of conscious experience, and, of course, the prospects of consciousness in AI. For more on metacognition and awareness, check out episode 73 with Megan Peters.
- Hakwan's lab: Consciousness and Metacognition Lab.
- Steve's lab: The MetaLab.
- Twitter: @hakwanlau; @smfleming.
- Hakwan's brief Aeon article: Is consciousness a battle between your beliefs and perceptions?
- Related papers
- An Informal Internet Survey on the Current State of Consciousness Science.
- Opportunities and challenges for a maturing science of consciousness.
- What is consciousness, and could machines have it?"
- Understanding the higher-order approach to consciousness.
- Awareness as inference in a higher-order state space. (Steve's bayesian predictive generative model)
- Consciousness, Metacognition, & Perceptual Reality Monitoring. (Hakwan's reality-monitoring model a la generative adversarial networks)
Timestamps 0:00 - Intro 7:25 - Steve's upcoming book 8:40 - Challenges to study consciousness 15:50 - Gurus and backscratchers 23:58 - Will the problem of consciousness disappear? 27:52 - Will an explanation feel intuitive? 29:54 - What do you want to be true? 38:35 - Lucid dreaming 40:55 - Higher order theories 50:13 - Reality monitoring model of consciousness 1:00:15 - Higher order state space model of consciousness 1:05:50 - Comparing their models 1:10:47 - Machine consciousness 1:15:30 - Nature of first order representations 1:18:20 - Consciousness prior (Yoshua Bengio) 1:20:20 - Function of consciousness 1:31:57 - Legacy 1:40:55 - Current projects