Jaan Aru is associate professor and co-principal investigator of the Natural and Artificial Intelligence Lab at the University of Tartu. In this episode of “Brain Inspired,” Aru and Paul Middlebrooks discuss the near-zero likelihood an AI model has anything remotely resembling consciousness. Brains are special in part because they process signals across all scales, from molecules to neurons to brain areas, and those “across-level” computations are inseparable from the physical substrates that implement them. They explore examples of biological details required for consciousness, such as a specific kind of signal integration in dendrites and loops between the cortex and thalamus.
Read the transcript.