Manuel Blum on Turing, Computing Theory, and the Possibility of Machine Consciousness 🤖

Abstract

Thanks to major advances in neuroscience, we are on the brink of a scientific understanding of how the brain achieves consciousness. This talk will describe neuroscientist Bernard Baars’s Global Workspace Model (GWM) of the brain and propose a formal Turing-Machine-like computational model inspired by it for understanding consciousness. One of several consequences of this Model is the possibility of free will in a completely deterministic world.

Biography

Manuel Blum, a Bruce Nelson University Professor of Computer Science at Carnegie Mellon University, is a pioneer in the field of theoretical computer science and winner of the 1995 Turing Award in recognition of his contributions to the foundations of computational complexity theory and its applications to cryptography and program checking, a mathematical approach to writing programs that check their work.

He studied at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and while studying electrical engineering, pursued a desire to understand thinking and brains by working in the neurophysiology laboratory of Dr. Warren S. McCulloch and Walter Pitts. He then concentrated on mathematical logic and recursion theory following the insight it offered on brains and thinking.

Blum has supervised the theses of 35 doctoral students who now pepper almost every major computer science department in the country. The many ground-breaking areas of theoretical computer science chartered by his academic descendants are legend. Three of his PhD students are also Turing Award winners.

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