Consciousness is often thought to be that aspect of mind that is least amenable to being understood or replicated by artificial intelligence (AI). The first-personal, subjective, what-it's-like-to-be-something nature of consciousness is thought to be untouchable by the computations, algorithms, processing and functions of AI method. And since AI is the most promising avenue toward artificial consciousness (AC), the conclusion many draw is that AC is even more doomed than AI supposedly is.
In what follows I hope to show that this pessimism is unfounded, based as it is on misunderstandings of AI, and a lack of awareness of the possible roles AI might play in accounting for or reproducing consciousness. I aim to do this by making some foundational distinctions relevant to AC, and using them to show that some common reasons given for AC scepticism do not touch some of the (usually neglected) possibilities for AC, such as prosthetic, discriminative, practically necessary, and lagom (necessary-but-not- sufficient) AC.
This talk is based on a paper of mine: http://www.cogs.susx.ac.uk/users/ronc/papers/phil-founds-artificial-consciousness.pdf .