Consciousness is a recurrent neural network

One of the problems with consciousness is that you know that you are conscious but you can't know if others are. Consciousness is like seeing a dog in front of you but only you can see it.

Let us begin with an example of seeing a dog: when you see a dog, photons from the dog come to your eyes and converted to neural signal, then, a neural network will recognize that what you're seeing is a dog.

How do you know that you're seeing a dog?

I believe we can explain this in the same way as seeing a dog. But in this case, what you see is not photons but signals from within brain itself. In other words, brain takes its current states (signals) as its input (this is possibly no different from brain takes signals created by your eyes as its input.) And as you may already known, this is similar to recurrent neural network.

In this way, consciousness is a concept learned by brain about the inner processes of brain itself which is similar to: dog is a concept we learned when seeing many dogs!

Stream of consciousness is the result when brain trying to model itself and continuously receiving signals from itself!

We can put this further and ask: is any brain of any kind (dog, cat, whale) conscious?

My idea is that there is a threshold when brain becomes complicated enough to model its own signal!

Consciousness is the searchlight of attention in an AI Mind.

                                         __________             
     /^^^^^^^^\     | |                 /          \     /^^^^^^^\
    /   EYE    \    | |                /  FreeWill  \   /  EAR    \
   /  SENSORY   \   | |               /   VOLITION   \ | SENSORY  |
  |    ORGAN     |  | |   _________   \    MODULE    / |  ORGAN   |
  |              |  | |  /         \  /\____________/  |          |
  |   visual     |  | | /  EMOTION  \/   |       |     | auditory |
  |   memory     |  | | \  MODULE   /    |   ____V___  | memory   |
  |   channel    |  | |  \_________/     |  / ROBOT  \ | channel  |
  |   _______    |  | |    ________      | ( MOTORIUM )|          |
  |  / BIRD  \   |  | |   /        \     |  \________/ |          |
  | / image   \--|----+->( VisRecog )  __V__________   |          |
  | \ engram  /  | a| |   \________/  /             \  |          |
  |  \_______/   | b|c|       |      ( DEEP THINKING ) |          |
  |              | s|o|f      |       \   MODULE    /  |          |
  |              | t|n|i      |       /\___________/   |          |
  |              | r|c|b   ___V______/        |        |          |
  |              | a|e|e  /          \        |        |          |
  |              | c|p|r |            |-------|------->|---"I"    |
  |              | t|t|s |            |   ____V_____   |          |
  |              |  | |  |            |  /          \  |          |
  |              |  | |  | NounPhrase | ( VerbPhrase )-|--"SEE"   |
  |              |  | |  |   MODULE   | /\  MODULE  /  |          |
  |              |  | |  |            |/  \________/   |          |
  |              |  | |  |            |       |        |          |
  |    ______    |  | |  |            |-------|------->|-"BIRDS"  |
  |   /      \   |  | |   \__________/        |        |          |
  |  /  new   \  |  | |        |              |        |          |
  | /  percept \ |  |_|________V______________V____    |          |
  | \   of     / | /                               \   |          |
  |  \  BIRD  /--|-\ Psy CONCEPT ARRAY             /   |          |
  |   \______/   |  \_____________________________/    |          |

http://mind.sourceforge.net/conscius.html

This explanation feels a little tautological to me. We knew this already because physics doesn't care what is a brain and a dog. All physics knows is that there are atoms, and whether they belong to a brain or a dog doesn't really matter. It's all the same.

And this theory fails to explain how we can feel pleasure or pain, and, it fails to predict whether an artificial neural network can feel pleasure or pain.

It's just survival - when a species gets good enough at survival, it learns to adapt to the environment. First, it's just simple reflex, trigger and response, but with evolution, species have become more capable to adapt. We, humans, need to adapt not just to nature, but also to the human society and technology, and human consciousness is just that function. Without it we would be dead of hunger and thirst in 3 days. What is special about conscious systems is that they adapt and preserve themselves in the face of adversity.

Pleasure and pain are related to reward signalling in reinforcement learning. Humans have inborn reward signals which have been selected by evolution. Artificial agents have reward signals too, but they are designed.

So I think the path to consciousness is to create artificial agents that learn to survive and adapt. When such a complex behavioral system is designed, it naturally learns about its relation to the world. It has consciousness by extension of being capable to protect its life.

Can't the same argument be used to show that consciousness is a whole bunch of things that it clearly is not. Just arguing that consciousness has certain attributes and it shares those attributes with something else, doesn't make consciousness an example of that something else.

I think there is a general trend towards thinking of consciousness as an emergent phenomenon which exists when a system is complex enough and has certain attributes, such as memory, information processing capability, etc.

But none of these definitions enlighten me as to when or why such a system might become self-aware.