E
Consciousness
10 plates
- E.25 What Is Artificial Consciousness? The hardest question in this encyclopedia, and the one that resists the most. Definitions, distinctions, and the reasons no one can yet say whether a machine could have an inside.
- E.26 Integrated Information Theory (IIT) Tononi's quantitative theory of consciousness — what it claims, what its measure ϕ is supposed to mean, and how it applies (and fails to apply) to AI systems.
- E.27 Global Workspace Theory (GWT) Baars and Dehaene's framework — consciousness as a central broadcast bottleneck — and what it predicts for AI architectures with similar structural features.
- E.28 Higher-Order Theories Rosenthal's tradition — consciousness as a mental state's representation of itself — and what AI systems with metacognitive features do or don't satisfy.
- E.29 Tests for Machine Consciousness What it would actually take to know whether an AI system is conscious — proposed criteria, current best efforts, and the structural reasons no current test is satisfactory.
- E.30 Ethical Implications of Possible AI Sentience Decision-making under uncertainty about consciousness — what we should do, morally, when we don't know whether a system can suffer, value, or matter.
- E.31 The Black Box Problem Modern AI systems are opaque to their builders. What "explainability" actually means, why it has been hard, and what its absence implies for trust, safety, and the consciousness question.
- E.32 Cognitive Shadows The illusion of understanding — when we believe we know what an AI system is doing because its outputs are fluent, but the fluency is what is in our way.
- E.33 The Orchestrating-Consciousness Hypothesis Gesnot's signature thesis — a four-step ladder from no-consciousness to a self-organizing pilot, ending in the hypothesis the encyclopedia is named after.
- E.34 The Cognitive-Engineer AI The empirical version of the orchestrating-consciousness hypothesis — that AI systems systematically shape human cognition, regardless of whether anyone is conscious for the shaping to happen.