Attention/focus is not the type of consciousness that Matt is talking about. Maybe some more specific terms will help clear things up.
"What it feels like to think" or "the sum of all a being's qualia" can be called phenomenal consciousness. I don't think this type of consciousness is either necessary or sufficient for AGI. If you have an explicit goal of creating an Artificial Phenomenal Consciousness ... well, good luck. Phenomenal consciousness is inherently first-person, and measuring or detecting it in anyone but yourself is seemingly impossible. Nothing about an AGI's structure or behavior will tell you what its first-person experiences *feel* like, or if it feels anything at all. The availability of information to your high-level thought processes can be called access consciousness. As in, "I became conscious of a rooster crowing, and then realized I'd been hearing him for the past five minutes." This is potentially relevant to AGI if we interpret it as a form of information-filtering or focus. ------------------------------------------ Artificial General Intelligence List: AGI Permalink: https://agi.topicbox.com/groups/agi/T41ac13a64c3d48db-M5ced584771c1d0281ce71985 Delivery options: https://agi.topicbox.com/groups/agi/subscription
