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Designing Conscious Systems

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Abstract

This paper reviews computational work that is currently developing under the heading of ‘Machine Consciousness’ and sets out to provide a guide for those who wish to contribute to this field. First, questions of philosophical concern as to the appropriateness of this activity are raised and discussed. Then some classical designs and computational attitudes are described before arguing that fine-grain neural approaches are needed to provide truly phenomenal representations that stand in relation to the behaviour of a computational organism as subjective mental states stand in relation to the existence of a conscious organism. The paper concludes with an evaluation of the validity and benefits of designing conscious systems.

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Notes

  1. http://www.theswartzfoundation.org/abstracts/2001_summary.asp.

  2. This suggests that science can only be done on the physical (body) and only correlations can be found to the subjective (mind). Chalmers has argued that the ‘hard problem’ for science is that it cannot prove that the physical implies the subjective.

  3. The term ‘mind’ needs definition within the virtual consciousness paradigm developed here. If a mental state is the current content of the consciousness of an organism, mind, as the capacity of all possible mental states as organised into a state structure, is the state structure of the organism.

  4. http://users.co.ac.uk/~kgroup/index.html.

  5. Lee has a PhD thesis (London University) in preparation on this topic: Aspects of affective action choice: computational modelling.

  6. The author is grateful to Ricardo Sanz of Madrid Universtiy for this example.

  7. Tononi [17] has developed a set of necessary ‘information integration’ measures that are meant to be necessary for consciousness. Whether this measure indicates the presence of consciousness or not is being debated. See also the paper by Seth [18].

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  1. Electrical and Electronic Engineering Department, Imperial College, London, SW7 2BT, UK

    Igor Aleksander

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  1. Igor Aleksander
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Correspondence to Igor Aleksander.

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Aleksander, I. Designing Conscious Systems. Cogn Comput 1, 22–28 (2009). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12559-009-9008-9

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