The take-home message: artificial consciousness does not equal artificial intelligence.

I've talked before about how consciousness needs to be looked at as a specialized activity of cognition. Aleksander takes the view, increasingly common in cognitive science, that cognition is not exactly the same thing as information processing. As he puts it in the interview,

I am certainly not impressed by people who say “The mind? No problem. It’s the software of the brain”. That is, they have a brain-as-a-computer view of things. While the two could be said to be information-driven devices, they operate on completely different principles. The brain is a system highly specialised by evolution; specialised to be a sensitive perceiving, imagining, attending, planning and emoting object. It is intelligent because it is so highly geared towards learning to interact with a world, the complexity of which has to be managed and understood.

This doesn't mean that the computing metaphor of cognition is wrong; it means that this metaphor is just that, a metaphor, and it has a particular limited domain of applicability.

Nonetheless, Aleksander may succeed in creating a conscious program. We wouldn't necessarily recognize it as such without training, because it would fail the Turing test. After all, he's not looking to create something intelligent enough to pass for human:

The point I am making is that there are many methods and intensities of being conscious. A mouse and I in the same environment would be conscious of different things - the things that are important to us. The intensity of my consciousness varies during the day. So if I make a machine that adheres to the five axioms [prerequisites for consciousness, --K.], it would do so with respect to its own needs.

For Aleksander and other researchers at the cutting edge of consciousness studies, sentience isn't about intelligence; it's about presence. If a physical system uses information processing to make itself and its environment present to itself, it could said to be conscious. For this it is necessary that the information processing system be tightly coupled into the environment: be, in a word, embodied.

Research on what consciousness is and how it functions continues to race ahead--so quickly that most people won't even know it's been happening before a robust, testable theory of consciousness emerges from the lab. That may happen very soon.

Who knows? In a couple of years you may be able to buy Consciousness for Windows(TM). It won't do anything, in all likelihood, but hey, at least when you glare at your computer you'll know there's something in there cringing.

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