Jürgen Schmidhuber

Jürgen Schmidhuber, co-director of the Dalle Molle Institute for Artificial Intelligence Research (IDSIA) in Lugano and head of the AI Initiative at KAUST, is among the most consequential living machine learning researchers, with foundational contributions to recurrent networks, meta-learning, and curiosity-driven exploration. His engagement with consciousness is architectural rather than metaphysical. His self-referential weight matrices and Gödel machine designs give an agent a machine-learning model of its own computational process that the agent uses to improve itself, and his essay series on learning to think argues that the interesting question is how a system comes to contain and exploit a model of itself.

The position that follows is a strict computational one. Whatever consciousness is, on his account the scientifically tractable part is self-modeling and self-improvement in general problem solvers, and the computable universe he describes admits artificial systems whose self-models are as rich as ours. He states plainly that he considers the consciousness question badly posed, and prefers to build the machines whose self-referential structure makes the question concrete.

For this site, Schmidhuber matters as the boundary case. His self-modeling machines supply exactly the architectural substrate theories of machine consciousness describe, while declining every phenomenal claim, which keeps the distinction between building the structure and explaining the experience in view.

Known for. Self-referential weight matrices, the Gödel machine, learning to think, computable universes, meta-learning machines that model their own search

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Jürgen Schmidhuber is listed with the other integrated information theorists, who hold that consciousness is intrinsic causal power, measured as integrated information. The theory family behind that position is set out in the index of consciousness theories. Every researcher covered on this site is indexed in the directory of consciousness researchers.