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QuEST (2024-06-07) Benjamin Kuipers - Drinking From the Firehose of Experience

Air Force Research Laboratory

May 12, 2025 | 01:16:50

Consciousness is an important but mysterious aspect of human intelligence. As AI researchers work toward building computational intelligent systems, what role should consciousness play in such systems?
Most of this talk describes steps toward a cognitive architecture to explain the benefits of consciousness to an intelligent agent, specifically in helping it cope with the overwhelming information content of its sensorimotor interaction with the physical world. First, a relatively small number of dynamic trackers provide continuous access to changing entities within the sensory field, simultaneously providing concise descriptions for symbolic reasoning and access to rich sensory input about those entities in the world. Second, a coherent sequential narrative is constructed, about 300-500 milliseconds after the fact, attempting to explain experienced events in terms of interactions among the tracked entities. The trackers and the narrative together provide a concise summary of the overwhelming complexity of sensorimotor interaction, with which the agent can reason and plan.
This cognitive architecture proposal addresses what is sometimes called the “Easy Problem” of consciousness. The “Hard Problem” is: “Why does consciousness feel like anything at all?” I offer some observations on perceptual vividness, and a few other philosophical matters related to consciousness.
Many of these ideas are introduced in “Drinking From the Firehose of Experience”

Key Moments and Questions in the video include:

What is the mind?
Consciousness is a Phenomenon in the World
The problems of Consciousness
AI and Robotics Provide Insights
What is a Robot?
Drinking from the Firehose of Experience
Trackers in the Sensor Stream
A simple Object Tracker
Fictional Tracker Illustration
A tracker is an index into the firehose of experience
Tackers: their importance is not a new idea
Making Sense of Experience
The Constructivist Agent
Intentionality
The problems of Consciousness
The Easy Problem
The Function of Consciousness
The Hard problem
Sneaking up on the Hard Problem
Vivid Qualia have Lots of Bits
Does information transfer feel like anything at all?
Can a Machine be Conscious
Pushing the Boundaries
Features of Consciousness
Conclusions
Open discussion