The Ghost in the Machine

An Artificial Intelligence Perspective on the Soul

Watch the 6th and final installment on the series From Computation to Consciousness by Joscha Bach below.

Artificial Intelligence gives us a uniquely fascinating and clear perspective of the nature of our minds and our relationship to reality. We will discuss perception, mental representation, agency, consciousness, selfhood, and how they can arise in a computational system, like our brain.

Cognitive Science describes our mind by identifying it as a particular kind of machine, a generally intelligent computer built from a nervous system embedded into the body of a social primate. Intelligence can be understood as a system’s ability to create models, usually in the service of regulating the interaction of this system with its environment. But how does such regulation give rise to a sense of self and conscious awareness?

This is the sixth and final installment on the series From Computation to Consciousness, which covers philosophy of mind, epistemology, the nature of consciousness, the emergence of social structure and the relationship between mind and universe using concepts from computer science and Artificial Intelligence.