October 4, 2024
The Conscious Turing Machine (CTM) is a machine model of consciousness inspired by Alan Turing’s simple yet powerful model of a computer and Bernhard Baars’ Global Workspace model of consciousness. In this brief presentation, we explore how the CTM might experience phenomena generally associated with consciousness and, while we do not claim this is how humans experience these phenomena, we suggest it provides some high- level understanding of how such experiences might be generated. We start with three examples related to vision: blindsight, inattentional blindness, and change blindness. Then we consider illusions, dreams and free will. This is joint work of Lenore, Manuel and Avrim Blum. See accompanying video by Manuel Blum.