Colloquium - Susanna Schellenberg: “Self-Reference and Metacognition in Human and Artificial Intelligence”

Our capacity for self-reference allows us to introspect on our thoughts and preferences, engage in metacognition, and evaluate our progress on projects while reconfiguring our approach as needed. Despite being central to human intelligence, it has received marginal attention in developing artificial intelligence. There are burgeoning signs of an artificial equivalent of our capacity for self-reference. To illustrate, so-called self-attention mechanisms in Large Language Models, meta-reinforcement learning modules, and second-guessing can each be argued to be examples of artificial self-reference. However, in each case, the capacity is rigid in scope compared to our human capacity, and it developed as a side effect of pursuing other goals. To date, no explicit attention has been directed at artificially replicating this central element of human intelligence. The paper argues that a general capacity for self-reference is key to bringing AI to the next level.

Professor Schellenberg's work focuses on a range of topics in epistemology, philosophy of mind, and philosophy of language. She is particularly interested in the nature of mental content, the epistemic role of perceptual experience, mental capacities, imagination, spatial perception, and evidence. She is the author of The Unity of Perception: Content, Consciousness, Evidence (Oxford University Press, 2018). In that book, she develops a unified account of the epistemological, phenomenological, and cognitive role of perception.