General Artificial Intelligence, Information and Consciousness: on D.I. Dubrovsky’s Interpretation

Abstract

The article is devoted to the analysis of the concept of artificial general intelligence (AGI) and its interpretation proposed by the Russian philosopher David Dubrovsky in his recent research papers. The first part of the article briefly outlines the current approaches to defining the concept of “artificial general intelligence”, including interpreting it as an artificial intelligent system capable of achieving common goals in a variety of environments. Referring to the texts of the most influential foreign researchers and developers, the author demonstrates the parallels between their proposed approaches to understanding general artificial intelligence and those interpretations proposed by David Dubrovsky and his co-authors. In particular, the commonality in the interpretations of the concept of the “world model” (Yan LeCun) and the concept of “techno-umwelt” is shown, as well as parallels between the hypothesis of “universal embodied AI” (Ben Herzel) and the arguments of the Russian philosopher about the possible implementation of AI through its involvement in various types of interactions with various worlds, virtual and physical. In the second part of the article, the potential of using the information approach developed by David Dubrovsky to solve the mind-body problem as a basis for explaining the phenomenon of general artificial intelligence is outlined. It is shown that despite the need to refine the concept of information causality proposed by the philosopher, his theory can contribute to a better understanding of the connection of possible AGI competencies with the phenomena of subjective reality. In conclusion, the key problems that currently make it difficult to find an answer to the question of the dependence of the qualities of general artificial intelligence on the presence of phenomenal consciousness are outlined. The emphasis is placed on the need to continue interdisciplinary cooperation between representatives of cognitive sciences, developers and philosophers, whose interaction is designed to help solve the characteristic difficulties associated with both the problem of conceptualizing the concept of “artificial general intelligence” and the problem of identifying consciousness in artificial intelligent systems.