Artificial Consciousness:From Impossibility to Realizability

The development of artificial intelligence has made artificial or machine consciousness a subject of interest.However,the idea of man as machine is not equivalent to the idea of machine as man.It is basically a consensus that humans are conscious while machines are not.However,the great success of AI has inspired people to explore the questions of artificial consciousness and artificial life,which inevitably involves many challenges and debates,including philosophical,ethical,as well as scientific and technological ones.Specifically,these challenges and debates relate to the possibility and impossibility of artificial consciousness,its relevance and compositional irrelevance to the mind,the morpho-computational versus realizability of intelligences and the coupling of their inner worlds to their outer environments,and the debate between realism and relationism about the moral status of artificial agent,with a central issue being the epistemological conundrum of how to know what a machine is conscious of,which may be solved by cultural construction and adaptive representation of artificial consciousness.