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Symposium on Adaptive Agents and Multi-agent Systems

Symposium on Adaptive Agents and Multi-agent Systems

AAMAS 2004, AAMAS 2003: Adaptive Agents and Multi-Agent Systems II pp 1–23Cite as

Gödel Machines: Towards a Technical Justification of Consciousness

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Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNAI,volume 3394))

Abstract

The growing literature on consciousness does not provide a formal demonstration of the usefulness of consciousness. Here we point out that the recently formulated Gödel machines may provide just such a technical justification. They are the first mathematically rigorous, general, fully self-referential, self-improving, optimally efficient problem solvers, “conscious” or “self-aware” in the sense that their entire behavior is open to introspection, and modifiable. A Gödel machine is a computer that rewrites any part of its own initial code as soon as it finds a proof that the rewrite is useful, where the problem-dependent utility function, the hardware, and the entire initial code are described by axioms encoded in an initial asymptotically optimal proof searcher which is also part of the initial code. This type of total self-reference is precisely the reason for the Gödel machine’s optimality as a general problem solver: any self-rewrite is globally optimal—no local maxima!—since the code first had to prove that it is not useful to continue the proof search for alternative self-rewrites.

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Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. IDSIA, Galleria 2, 6928, Manno (Lugano), Switzerland

    Jürgen Schmidhuber

  2. TU Munich, Boltzmannstr. 3, 85748, Garching, München, Germany

    Jürgen Schmidhuber

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  1. Jürgen Schmidhuber
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Editors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Computer Science, University of York, YO10 5DD, York, UK

    Daniel Kudenko

  2. Artificial Intelligence Group, Department of Computer Science, University of York, Heslington, York, UK

    Dimitar Kazakov

  3. Department of Computing, City University, P.O. Box, EC1V 0HB, London, United Kingdom

    Eduardo Alonso

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Schmidhuber, J. (2005). Gödel Machines: Towards a Technical Justification of Consciousness. In: Kudenko, D., Kazakov, D., Alonso, E. (eds) Adaptive Agents and Multi-Agent Systems II. AAMAS AAMAS 2004 2003. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 3394. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-540-32274-0_1

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-540-32274-0_1

  • Publisher Name: Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-540-25260-3

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-540-32274-0

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