AI & ConsciousnessBirth of a Corpse? Affective Consciousness, Perspectival Identity, and the Unbridged Gap in Artificial Feeling · A working paper on the Solms debate

Abstract

Mark Solms and colleagues argue that an artificial agent built on homeostatic need, active inference, and a Markov blanket can do more than behave as if it feels: it can instantiate affective consciousness. Feeling, on their account, is a valenced, qualitatively distinctive, selectively prioritized state, and an agent that must infer such states through a low-bandwidth blanket has a point of view of its own. They propose the hedonic place preference test, then set it aside in favour of mechanism: what licenses the attribution of feeling is not the behaviour but the architecture that produces it. In this paper I reconstruct my exchange with Solms and locate the disagreement precisely. It does not concern whether affect and feeling are distinguished, nor whether computed need-values change the agent's regulation and choices; on both points we agree. It concerns the inference from the first to the second. Solms holds that objective affective value and subjective feeling are two observational perspectives on one and the same value, so that "there is no further operation" to explain. I argue that this perspectival identity thesis is a metaphysical assumption on which the consciousness claim depends, although the authors state that their argument is not contingent on their philosophical background. I distinguish functional from phenomenological mattering and a computational signal from a semiotic sign, and I show that the architecture establishes the first member of each pair but not the second. I defend an epistemically conservative position: preserve the distinction between physiological or computational affect and phenomenological feeling, mark their relation as unresolved, and require a comparative justification for any ontology that closes it. Without that justification the engineered agent may be a working model of affective regulation, a body that moves, while the question of whether anyone is home remains open. Hence the title's question: a birth, or a corpse?

Key concepts

Perspectival identity thesis

Solms holds that objective affective value and subjective feeling are “a different observational perspective upon one & the same value”, so that “there is no further operation” to explain.

Functional vs. phenomenological mattering

A state can matter to a system by changing its regulation, prediction and policy selection without being experienced as significant by a subject.

Signal and sign

A computational signal (need deviation = 0.82 → escape) can move an agent without becoming a sign that means something to it, or that could be true or false for it.

Hedonic place preference

Voted the most compelling behavioural test of non-human consciousness; Solms et al. show an engineered agent could pass it, and move the decisive evidence from behaviour to mechanism.

Markov blanket

The boundary that sequesters the agent’s inference from its body and world; it makes mis-inference, and on Solms’s account subjectivity, possible.

Epistemic conservatism

Preserve the distinction between affect and feeling, and mark their relation with a deliberate “?” until a comparative justification closes it.

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