Here is an answer to the question, (Rephrased from Xyed Abz) “Isn’t consciousness the only algorithm we need to build to create a artificial general intelligence like humans or animals?”
My thought:
Xyed Abz: I like your question because it not exactly those “How do you build an AGI, Muahaha?”-type of fluffy topic. At least you thought about “consciousness” is important in building intelligent machine.
But then why AIDL doesn’t talk about the consciousness more? Part of the reasons is that the English term consciousness is fairly ambiguous. There are at least three definitions: “wakefulness” which humans are awake. A bit like you just wake up, but then you are not too aware of the surroundings. Then there is “attention” which is certain groups of world stimulation is arriving to your perception. And finally is a kind of “cognition access” which is Oh, out out all these things you attended, such as I am typing with my fingers, I feel the keyboard, I listen to the fan noice, I listen to car running outside. I decide to allow “writing” to occupy my mind.
Just a side note, these categorization are not arbitrary. Nor it is come up by me. This thinking can be traced to Christoph Koch and his long time collaborator, Francis Crick (The Nobel Prize Winner of DNA discovery). Stannish Dahaene is also another representative of such thought. I often use this school of thought to explain because they are the ones which has more backup from experiments.
So to your question, we should first ask what you actually mean by consciousness? If you meant a kind of “cognition access”, yeah, I do think it is one of the keys to build intelligent machine. Because you may think that all the deep learning machines we build is only one type of “attention” we created, but there is no central binding mechanism to control them. That’s what Bengio called “Cognition” in his HODL interview.
Will that be enough? Of course not. Just as I said, if you do build a binding mechanism, you are also suppose to build the perception mechanism to go around it as well. At least that’s what’s going on with humans.
Now, all these sound very nice, so aren’t we have a theory already? Nope, even Koch and Dahaene’s ideas are more hypothesis about the brain. But how does this “cognitive access” mechanism actually works? No one knows. Koch believes it is a region call claustrum in the brain which carries out such mechanism, yet there are many disagree with him. And of course, even if you find such region, it will take humans a while to reverse engineer it. So you might have heard of “cognitive architecture” which suggest different mechanism how the brain works.
Does it sound complicated? Yes, it is. Especially we really don’t know what we are talking about. People who are super assertive about the brain, usually don’t know what they are talk about. That’s why I rather go party/dance/sing karaoke. But today is Saturday, why not?
Hope it is helpful!
Arthur