General Intelligence: An Ecumenical Heuristic for Artificial Consciousness Research?
Journal of Artificial Intelligence and Consciousness September 1, 2020 Henry Shevlin
The science of consciousness has advanced but faces difficulty reaching consensus about artificial consciousness. Practical and ethical questions about whether artificial systems can suffer may soon arise, yet methods for assessing consciousness in humans and animals do not straightforwardly apply to artificial systems. The author proposes developing ecumenical heuristics for artificial consciousness that are intuitively plausible, theoretically neutral, and scientifically tractable. General intelligence—understood as robust, flexible, integrated cognition and behavior—is argued to satisfy these criteria and could provide a basis for making tentative assessments of which artificial systems are most likely to be conscious.