Mark Bickhard

The possibilities, if any, of ‘artificial’ mental phenomena, including consciousness, depend on what the metaphysical nature of such phenomena are. I will outline a model of metaphysical emergence, and, based on that, emergent mental phenomena, with a focus on cognition and consciousness. This model suggests that ‘artificial’ mental phenomena are possible, though not with current technology. Furthermore, such ‘artificial’ mental phenomena would require, in effect, the creation of artificial life, at least in a metabolic sense.

Anticipation or prediction is generally assumed to be based on some sort of representation. Such representations will be involved, for example, in a model – causal, statistical, dynamic, and other kinds of model – of the system or phenomena to be anticipated. This form of anticipation certainly exists, and is quite important.I will argue, however, that there is a more basic form of anticipation that does not require representation, but is, in fact, constitutive of representation. The intuition underlying this point is that anticipation can be true or false, thus, have truth value, and thus constitute representation in its own right. But how such anticipation can occur without being based on representation itself will be my focus.