A Philosophical Examination of Artificial Consciousness's Realizability from the Perspective of Adaptive Representation

The rapid development of artificial intelligence (AI) has made artificial consciousness (AC) or machine consciousness (MC) an important topic of interest. Yet, the idea of man as machine is not equivalent to the idea of machine as man. It is basically a consensus that humans are conscious while machines are not. The great success of AI has inspired people to explore the questions of AC and artificial life, which inevitably involves many challenges and debates, including philosophical, ethical, as well as scientific and technological ones. Specifically, these challenges and debates relate to the possibility and impossibility of AC, its relevance and compositional irrelevance to the mind, the morphological computation versus realizability of intelligence and the coupling of their inner worlds to their outer environments, and the debate between realism and relativism about the moral status of artificial agent, with a central issue being the epistemological puzzle of how to know what a machine is conscious of, which may be solved by adaptive representation as well as cultural construction of AC.