Consciousness and Artificial Intelligence:
Theoretical foundations and current approaches

AAAI Symposium, Washington DC, 8-11 November 2007

Symposium objectives (*)

The symposium will provide a lively and focused venue to present the current state of research and to discuss both the experimental result, the theoretical foundations of this emerging field and their relationship with traditional Artificial Intelligence. The symposium will consist of two days and a half. It will be divided in three parts: 1) theoretical issues (first day), and 2) models and implementations (second day), and 3) open discussion (last half day). During each day there will be space both for invited speakers and for papers selected by means of the call of papers of the symposium. Each invited speaker will have a time slot of 45 minutes, while the selected papers will use 20 minutes each.

The first day will focus on the theoretical issues underlying machine consciousness: surveys of recent research in the philosophy, psychology and neuroscience of consciousness and how it can inform AI, potential for AI to inform consciousness research, how the machine consciousness approach is more than just a re-packaging of work already being done in AI, etc. (Aleksander, 2000; Chrisley, 2003; Manzotti, 2005; Manzotti, 2006; Chella and Manzotti, 2007).

This part will involve an three invited speakers and 2-3 talks from the call for papers of the symposium.

The second day will move to discussion of the four highlighted aspects of machine consciousness with reference to specific implemented systems. This part will involve 1-2 talks for each of the four aspects.

Finally, during the half day there will be one or two invited speaker that will focus on the general perspectives of artificial consciousness and AI. The remaining time will be used for an open discussion among the participants about what is shared and what is not. The discussion will be chaired by the organizers and it will cover the relationships with traditional AI, the future objectives and the future trends of the field.

* Consciousness and Artificial Intelligence - AAAI Symposium - 2007 - Webpage.

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