#15: Dr. Heather Berlin on the Future of Artificial Intelligence

“While our understanding of consciousness is yet incomplete, the biological components that it consists of appear to be fundamental building blocks.“

– Dr. Heather Berlin, Neuropsychologist and Assistant Clinical Professor at Mount Sinai

In Episode 15 of our podcast On Consciousness with Bernard Baars, our returning guest is neuropsychologist Dr. Heather Berlin, an Assistant Clinical Professor in Psychiatry at Mount Sinai School of Medicine. Dr. Berlin is a trained neuroscientist and a clinical psychologist.

Dr. Heather Berlin shares her thoughts on where the future development of general artificial intelligence is heading, and both Bernie and Heather express their skepticism that humanity will be able to create conscious machines. They go on to explain that while our understanding of consciousness is yet incomplete, the biological components that it consists of appear to be fundamental building blocks.

Here is a brief excerpt from the episode:

Ilian Daskalov:
Where do you think we are going with the development of AI? Would we ever be able to create artificial general intelligence?

 

Heather Berlin:
So I think there’s a number of camps about whether these sort of AI systems will ever be conscious depending on the theory of consciousness that you abide by or where there’s the most evidence. But if, for example, a number of them, including Global Workspace Theory, and maybe Bernie can correct me if I’m wrong and I see… It just seems like there’s something about the physical substrate that you need that I don’t think that if it was a software program that you would necessarily get general AI, it’s like simulating, whether it’s not going to actually be wet, but then you actually need to build a physical structure. It doesn’t necessarily have to be out of biological substances. It could be out of silicon, but you need some sort of neuromorphic computer that has the same kind of functional connections that we have in our brain. 

 

But I just don’t think that you would ever get it from like a software program. And even in a non-biological system that you build, I’m still skeptical that consciousness, it can be, it is like sort of substrate independent. Like it can be re-instantiated at any system, as long as it has the right kind of functional connections. I just feel like, and I have no evidence to support this, but I feel like there’s something about the biological matter that it evolves within a human species over time in a body, you know. But I could be wrong. That’s just sort of feeling I have, but if it was going to happen, I think it would be in some sort of actually building like a neuromorphic computer that can potentially have subjective states. 

 

And also the age old question is that if they were conscious or not, how would we know? And we won’t really know unless we have agreed upon overarching theory of consciousness to know whether that AI system has it, does a fetus have it, does a bee have it? We won’t really know because it’s first person subjective experience and only that entity who knows if it has it. And so the only way we outsiders can know is if we have a really all-encompassing theory and then we can kind of test these different systems. So there’s the question of whether they have it or not. And then the second level question is how would we know if they have it?

To listen to the full episode, CLICK HERE!

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Talking Points:

• 0:00 – Intro with Bernard Baars, Dr. Heather Berlin & Student Interviewer, Ilian Daskalov

• 1:14 – Self-regulation and impulsivity

• 6:59 – Communicating science effectively

• 10:57 – The future of AI

• 16:23 – The notion of free will

• 19:30 – Future scientific discoveries

• 22:33 – Advice for neuroscience students

Bios

Dr. Heather Berlin: a dual-trained neuroscientist and clinical psychologist, and assistant clinical professor of psychiatry at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mont Sinai in NY. She explores the neural basis of impulsive and compulsive psychiatric and neurological disorders with the aim of developing novel treatments. She is also interested in the brain basis of consciousness, dynamic unconscious processes, and creativity. Clinically, she specializes in lifespan (child, adolescent, and adult) treatment of anxiety, mood, and impulsive and compulsive disorders (e.g. OCD), blending her neural perspective with cognitive behavioral therapy, mindfulness, and humanistic approaches

Ilian Daskalov is a senior undergraduate student at University of California, Irvine where he studies Cognitive Science. His research interests include sleep, psychedelics, and artificial intelligence and he is passionate about communicating science and promoting critical thinking.

Global Workspace Theory (GWT) began with this question: “How does a serial, integrated and very limited stream of consciousness emerge from a nervous system that is mostly unconscious, distributed, parallel and of enormous capacity?”

GWT is a widely used framework for the role of conscious and unconscious experiences in the functioning of the brain, as Baars first suggested in 1983.

A set of explicit assumptions that can be tested, as many of them have been. These updated works by Bernie Baars, the recipient of the 2019 Hermann von Helmholtz Life Contribution Award by International Neural Network Society form a coherent effort to organize a large and growing body of scientific evidence about conscious brains.