Renowned researchers Manuel Blum and Lenore Blum have devoted their entire lives to the study of computer science with a particular focus on consciousness.
And, just recently, they published new research that could serve as a blueprint for developing and demonstrating machine consciousness.
That paper, titled “A Theoretical Computer Science Perspective on Consciousness,” may only a be a pre-print paper, but even if it crashes and burns at peer-review (it almost surely won’t) it’ll still hold an incredible distinction in the world of theoretical computer science.
It’s a fascinating and well-explained bit of hardcore research that very well could change some perspectives on machine consciousness.
In this context, a Conscious Turing Machine (CTM) would appear to be any machine that can demonstrate consciousness.
This allows the machine to demonstrate adherence to a theory of time and for it to experience the mechanical equivalent of pain and pleasure.
According to the researchers, the competing chunks would have greater weight if the information they carried indicated the machine was in extreme pain: In the deterministic CTM, the difficulty for a chunk to get into short-term memory (STM) is measured by how much greater the chunk’s intensity would have to be for it to get into STM.
A machine programmed with such a stream of consciousness would effectively have the bulk of its processing power (mental bandwidth) taken up by extreme amounts of pain.