Subjectivity as Self-Simulation: Virtualising the Cartesian Theatre

Roly Perera

Abstract: Scientific theories of subjective experience, such as such as Global Workspace theory and Attention Schema theory, are being co-opted as architectural proposals for artificial systems. A lack of consensus on what a scientific theory of subjectivity should actually explain will make it hard to evaluate any such artificial systems, however. In this paper, we adopt a naturalistic starting point, rejecting the idea that science must explain why we have subjective experiences, and instead suggest that science need only explain why we take ourselves to be having subjective experiences. But we resist the idea that this move leads to some kind of illusionism; instead we propose a more functionalist approach that saves certain key realist intuitions.

External IDs:dblp:conf/agi/Perera25