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June 29th, 2024

Edelman's Steps Toward a Conscious Artifact (2021)

Gerald Edelman's roadmap for a Conscious Artifact, discussed in 2006, influences neuroscience and AI. The unpublished paper outlines key steps, spanning neurons, cognition, and AI, with two versions updated until May 2021.

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Edelman's Steps Toward a Conscious Artifact (2021)

The paper discusses Gerald Edelman's roadmap towards creating a Conscious Artifact, presented during a meeting at The Neurosciences Institute in 2006. Although the roadmap was not officially published, it has influenced the author and many others over the years. Based on notes from the meeting, the paper outlines the key steps in this groundbreaking roadmap, which remains as relevant today as it was over 15 years ago. The document includes 7 pages, 1 figure, and 1 table, focusing on topics related to Neurons and Cognition as well as Artificial Intelligence. The submission history shows two versions of the paper, with the latest revision on May 25, 2021. The paper is available for further exploration through the provided DOI link.

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Link Icon 3 comments
By @jstanley - 5 months
I've given this a skim, and it seems to be very much "of its time" (the notes were written in 2006, but only published in this paper in 2021). It basically takes as an axiom that in order to be conscious you need to be interacting with the physical environment.

But the thinking has moved on since then, and we can view the internet as an alternative "environment" in which a conscious entity could exist.

Instead of existing primarily in the physical world and using clumsy tools to access the internet, conscious artifacts will exist primarily in the internet and will use clumsy tools to access the physical world.

By @bondarchuk - 5 months
sec. 3.5: "Edelman thought that action selection and the sequence of actions was a first step towards language. He was a strong proponent of the idea that language was rooted in action and motor control."

Interesting idea.