"Conscious Machines: Memory, Melody and Imagination"

by Susan A.J. Stewart

At first glance the question, ''Will conscious machines perform better than 'unconscious' machines?'', seems innocuous or, at least, to elicit a straightforward positive response, but it prompts the question, ''Perform what?''. If the aim is to produce a machine that will perform as a human being or other phenomenally conscious agent in an intersubjectively-demanding social and moral environment, then there can be little doubt that a conscious machine would out-perform an `unconscious' machine. But there are also circumstances in which a conscious, empathetic, decision-making, risk-taking agent would be a distinct disadvantage, and I will allude to circumstances of this kind briefly towards the end of the paper.

Following on from Damasio's [1991, 1994, 1999, 2003] claims for the necessity of pre-reflective conscious, emotional, bodily responses for the development of an organism's core and extended consciousness, I will argue that without these capacities any agent would be significantly less likely to make effective decisions and survive. Moreover, I will argue that machine phenomenology is only possible within a distributed system that possesses a subtle musculature and a nervous system such that it can, through action and repetition, develop its kinaesthetic memory, individual kinaesthetic melodies, and an enactive kinaesthetic imagination. Without these capacities a potentially conscious machine would remain unconscious. It would be without the necessary nuanced somatosensory awareness of its active engagement, even if that action is to some extent goal-directed, and would be incapable of developing the sorts of somatic markers or saliency tags that enable affective reactions, and which are indispensable for effective decision-making.

Available here.

Accepted for presentation at the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence (AAAI), Washington, VA., 7-11 November 2007, and to appear in the Proceedings of FSS-07: AI and Consciousness: Theoretical Foundations and Current Approaches.

After Nature/themes for meetings

1. on rules (AF) Wednesday 1/10
2. Second Nature (RH) Thursday
3. OULIPO + Collage (AF+RH) Friday
4. Alterity: set a trap in city for disrupting existing flow and capturing (student work) Monday.
5. Alterity crit (all) Tuesday
6. Hacking seminar; assignment for next Monday; redesign seminar as pedagogical experience (include interior, furniture, language, architecture, behaviour, role, gender etc) Thursday.
7. Seminar (designed by students) crit. Monday.
8. Presentation and discussion of final assignment. Tuesday.
9. Own work.

After Nature:The Arts of the Machine

Research Through Practice Studio 2
Konstfack University College of Art, Craft and Design
Fall 2008
Tutors: Rolf Hughes and Alberto Frigo

"Another very wrong idea that is also going the rounds at the moment is the equivalence that has been established between inspiration, exploration of the subconscious, and liberation, between chance, automatism, and freedom. Now this sort of inspiration, which consists in blindly obeying every impulse, is in fact slavery. The classical author who wrote his tragedy observing a certain number of known rules is freer than the poet who writes down whatever comes into his head and is slave to other rules of which he knows nothing."
Raymond Queneau


Keywords:
Alterity, authenticity, originality, copy, authorship, design theory, creativity, auto-poiesis, human experience, accountability, authority, ownership, oeuvre, intention, OULIPO, emergence, generative & evolutionary design, interdisciplinarity, art, metaphor, biotechnology, nanotechnology, fake, forgery, masquerade, ventriloquism, counterfeits, non-inductive, spontaneous, copyright, disguise, deception, natural, non-heroic, automatic, mechanistic, rituaistic, repetition, difference, the inhuman.

Aims:
This studio is set up to question whether or not practice-based research, with its particular emphasis on experiential, embodied and “tacit” knowledge, is dependent on concepts of authenticity and integrity grounded in a historically specific understanding of human selfhood. In order to investigate this, we will investigate performances of creativity and/or cultural production which are variously characterised as combinatorial, generative, “post human”, automatic etc. By automating acts of ‘creativity’, we seek to explore whether the concept of the “human” is becoming a nostalgic fetish in art, craft and design discourse as well as practice-based or “artistic” research.

Toward a General Theory of the Constraint

by Bernardo Schiavetta

This text proposes a series of definitions, the aim of which is to better circumscribe what is, and what is not, meant by writing under constraint. I shall do so by using exclusively logical and objective criteria. Of course, this does not mean that aesthetic or ideological problems are of no concern here, on the contrary, but it wouldn't be serious to tackle these very complex questions as long as there exists no precise definition of constraints.

Here.

Wild Nature and the Digital Life Special Issue

Generative and Emergent' Essays
Guest edited by Dene Grigar

Locative and Performative' Essays
Guest edited by Sue Thomas

Here.