Consciousness as Sensation - a Breakthrough Approach to Artificial General Intelligence (AGI)

This paper presents a breakthrough approach to artificial general intelligence (AGI). The criteria of AGI named in the literature go beyond the boundaries of actual intelligence and point to the necessity of modeling consciousness. Consciousness is a functional organ that has no structural localization; its modeling is possible by modeling functions immanent to consciousness. One of the basic functions is sensation - the image of an external influence or the internal state of an organism coming into consciousness. We turn to the concept of sensation presented in the Anthropology of Hegel's Philosophy of Spirit, according to which any content, including spiritual, ethical, logical, and other content comes into consciousness through its embodiment in the form of sensation. The results of neurobiological and psychophysiological experiments (electroencephalograms, MRI), which record the connection of sensations and cognitive acts with mental states and changes in the neural environment of the brain, point to the realism of Hegel's philosophical concept and the legitimacy of its application to the solution of scientific and technical problems. The paper argues for the realism of the Hegelian philosophical concept of sensation and discusses the possibility of modeling the activity of consciousness by operating with complexes of sensations in terms of attention, content manipulation, and volitional acts. The principle of linking (embodiment) of sense (mental) and signifying (sensed) content is expressed by the thesis - “consciousness is a kind of sensation”. Prospective developments of AGI obtain original conceptual semantics for solving hard-to-formalize problems on modeling intelligence and consciousness. #CSOC1120.

Series Title: Lecture Notes in Networks and Systems DOI: 10.1007/978-3-031-70300-3_29