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Consciousness is only marginally relevant to artificial intelligence (AI), because to most researchers in the field other problems seem more pressing. The purpose of consciousness, from an evolutionary perspective, is often held to have something to do with the allocation and organization of scarce cognitive resources. This chapter describes Daniel Dennett's idea of the intentional stance, in which an observer explains a system's behavior by invoking such intentional categories as beliefs and goals. The computationalist theory of phenomenal consciousness ends up looking like a spoil-sport's explanation of a magic trick. The chapter focuses on critiques that are specifically directed at computational models of consciousness, as opposed to general critiques of materialist explanation. The contribution of artificial intelligence to consciousness studies has been slender so far, because almost everyone in the field would rather work on better defined, less controversial problems.

DOI: 10.1017/CBO9780511816789.007