Artificial consciousness (AC), also known as machine consciousness (MC) or synthetic consciousness, is a field related to artificial intelligence and cognitive robotics whose aim is to define that which would have to be synthesized were consciousness to be found in an engineered artifact. (Aleksander 1995) Image File history File links Broom_icon. ... Bold text[[Link title]] “AI” redirects here. ... Cognitive robotics (CR) is concerned with endowing robots with high-level cognitive capabilities to enable the achievement of complex goals in complex environments using limited computational resources. ...

Neuroscience hypothesizes that consciousness is generated by the interoperation of various parts of the brain, called the neural correlates of consciousness, or NCCs. The brain somehow avoids the problem described in the Homunculus fallacy and overcomes the problems described below in the next section. Proponents of AC believe computers can emulate this interoperation, which is not yet fully understood. Drawing of the cells in the chicken cerebellum by S. Ramón y Cajal Neuroscience is a field that is devoted to the scientific study of the nervous system. ... For other uses, see Brain (disambiguation). ... The neural correlate of consciousness (NCC) is a term made popular by Francis Crick and Christof Koch in the early 1990s. ... A homunculus argument accounts for a phenomenon in terms of the very phenomenon that it is supposed to explain. ... This article is about the machine. ...

The nature of consciousness

Main article: Consciousness

According to naïve and direct realism, humans perceive directly while brains perform processing. According to indirect realism and dualism, brains contain data obtained by processing but what people perceive is a mental model or state appearing to overlay physical things as a result of projective geometry (such as the point observation in René Descartes' dualism). Which of these approaches to consciousness is correct is fiercely debated. Consciousness is a quality of the mind generally regarded to comprise qualities such as subjectivity, self-awareness, sentience, sapience, and the ability to perceive the relationship between oneself and ones environment. ... Naïve realism is a common sense theory of perception. ... Direct realism is a theory of perception that claims that the senses provide us with direct awareness of the external world. ... Indirect Realism is the view in cognitive psychology that perception functions via internal representations of external reality. ... This article does not cite any references or sources. ... “Descartes” redirects here. ...

Direct perception problematically requires a new physical theory allowing conscious experience to supervene directly on the world outside the brain. But if people perceive indirectly through a world model in the brain, then a new physical phenomenon, other than the endless further flow of data, would be needed to explain how the model becomes experience. In philosophy, supervenience is a well-defined dependency relation between higher-level (. mental) and lower-level (. physical) properties. ...

If people perceive directly, self-awareness is difficult to explain because one of the principal reasons for proposing direct perception is to avoid Ryle's regress where internal processing recurses infinitely. Self-awareness in robots is being investigated by Junichi Takeno[1] at Meiji University in Japan, who claims to have developed a robot that can discriminate between its own image in a mirror and another robot[2][3], and this claim has been already reviewed. (Takeno, Inaba & Suzuki 2005) Direct perception also demands that one cannot really be aware of dreams, imagination, mental images or any inner life because these would involve recursion. It has been suggested that this article or section be merged with Self-consciousness. ... In philosophy, Ryles regress is a classic argument against cognitivist theories, and concludes that such theories are essentially meaningless as they do not explain what they purport to explain. ... This article is about the concept of recursion. ... Meiji UniversitySchool house. ...

Self awareness is less problematic for entities that perceive indirectly because, by definition, they are perceiving their own state. However, as mentioned above, proponents of indirect perception must suggest some phenomenon, either physical or dualist to prevent Ryle's regress. If people perceive indirectly then self awareness might result from the extension of experience in time described by Immanuel Kant, William James and Descartes. Unfortunately this extension in time may not be consistent with our current understanding of physics. “Kant” redirects here. ... This article needs additional references or sources for verification. ...

Information processing and consciousness

Information processing consists of encoding a state, such as the geometry of an image, on a carrier such as a stream of electrons, and then submitting this encoded state to a series of transformations specified by a set of instructions called a program. In principle the carrier could be anything, even steel balls or onions, and the machine that implements the instructions need not be electronic, it could be mechanical or fluidic. In general, information processing is the changing (processing) of information in any manner detectable by an observer. ... A computer program is a collection of instructions that describe a task, or set of tasks, to be carried out by a computer. ...

Digital computers implement information processing. From the earliest days of digital computers people have suggested that these devices may one day be conscious. One of the earliest workers to consider this idea seriously was Alan Turing. Alan Mathison Turing, OBE, FRS (23 June 1912 – 7 June 1954) was an English mathematician, logician, and cryptographer. ...

If technologists were limited to the use of the principles of digital computing when creating a conscious entity they would have the problems associated with the philosophy of strong AI. The most serious problem is John Searle's controversial Chinese room argument which seeks to demonstrate that the act of computation does not necessarily produce a conscious experience of understanding. In the philosophy of artificial intelligence, strong AI is the supposition that some forms of artificial intelligence can truly reason and solve problems; strong AI supposes that it is possible for machines to become sapient, or self-aware, but may or may not exhibit human-like thought processes. ... John Rogers Searle (born July 31, 1932 in Denver, Colorado) is the Slusser Professor of Philosophy at the University of California, Berkeley, and is noted for contributions to the philosophy of language, philosophy of mind and consciousness, on the characteristics of socially constructed versus physical realities, and on practical reason. ... This article or section does not cite its references or sources. ...

Searle's objection does not convince everybody. Direct perception proponents maintain that 'meaning' is only to be found in objects of perception. Many philosophers have abandoned intrinsic meaning for Wittgensteinian approaches, conceptual role semantics, and so on. The objection is also countered by the concept of strong emergentism which proposes some unspecified new physical phenomenon arises from processor complexity. Ludwig Wittgenstein (1889-1951), pictured here in 1930, made influential contributions to Logic and the philosophy of language, critically examining the task of conventional philosophy and its relation to the nature of language. ... Inferential role semantics (also: conceptual role semantics, functional role semantics, procedural semantics) is an approach to the theory of meaning heavily influenced by Ludwig Wittgensteins later philosophy in that it identifies meaning with use. ... Strong emergence is a type of emergence in which the emergent property is irreducible to its individual constituents. ...

The debate about whether a machine could be conscious under any circumstances is usually described as the conflict between physicalism and dualism. Dualists believe that there is something non-physical about consciousness whilst physicalists hold that all things are physical. The term physicalism was coined by Otto Neurath, in a series of early 20th century essays on the subject, in which he wrote According to physicalism, the language of physics is the universal language of science and, consequently, any knowledge can be brought back to the statements on the physical... This article does not cite any references or sources. ...

Consciousness in digital computers

There are various aspects of consciousness generally deemed necessary for a machine to be artificially conscious. A variety of functions in which consciousness plays a role were suggested by Bernard Baars. The aim of AC is to define whether and how these and other aspects of consciousness can be synthesized in an engineered artefact such as digital computer. This list is not exhaustive; there are many others not covered.

Self-awareness

A generally accepted criterion for sentience and consciousness is self-awareness: one dictionary defines conscious to mean "having an awareness of one's environment and one's own existence, sensations, and thoughts" (dictionary.com). The 1913 Webster's Dictionary defines conscious as "possessing knowledge, whether by internal, conscious experience or by external observation; cognizant; aware; sensible". An AC system should be capable of achieving various aspects (or by a more strict view, all verifiable, known, objective, and observable aspects) of consciousness. While self-awareness is very important, it may be subjective and is generally difficult to test.^{[original research?]} Not to be confused with sapience. ... It has been suggested that this article or section be merged with Self-consciousness. ...

Anticipation

The ability to predict (or anticipate) foreseeable events is considered important for AC by Igor Aleksander. The emergentist multiple drafts principle proposed by Daniel Dennett in Consciousness Explained may be useful for prediction: It involves the evaluation and selection of the most appropriate "draft" to fit the current environment. Igor Aleksander is currently (2005) an emeritus professor of Neural Systems Engineering at Department of Electrical and Electronic Engineering at Imperial College, London. ... Daniel Dennetts Multiple Drafts Theory or Model of Consciousness is a physical theory of consciousness based upon the proposal that the brain acts as an information processor. ... Daniel Clement Dennett (born March 28, 1942 in Boston, Massachusetts) is a prominent American philosopher whose research centers on philosophy of mind, philosophy of science and philosophy of biology, particularly as those fields relate to evolutionary biology and cognitive science. ... Cover of Consciousness Explained Consciousness Explained (published 1991) is a controversial book by the American philosopher Daniel Dennett which attempts to explain how consciousness arises from interaction of physical and cognitive processes in the brain. ...

Awareness

Awareness could be another required aspect, but there are many problems with the exact definition of awareness. The results of the experiments of neuroscanning on monkeys suggest that a process, not a state or object activates neurons [4]. For such reaction there must be created a model of the process based on the information received through the senses in such a way demands a lot of flexibility, and is also useful for making predictions. In biological psychology, awareness describes a human or animals perception and cognitive reaction to a condition or event. ...

Learning

Learning is also considered necessary for AC. An interesting article about learning is Implicit learning and consciousness [5] by Axel Cleeremans, University of Brussels and Luis Jiménez, University of Santiago, where learning is defined as “a set of philogenetically advanced adaptation processes that critically depend on an evolved sensitivity to subjective experience so as to enable agents to afford flexible control over their actions in complex, unpredictable environments” Axel Cleeremans (born March 5, 1962, Brussels, Belgium) is a Research Director with the National Fund for Scientific Research (Belgium) and a professor of cognitive science with the Department of Psychology of the Université Libre de Bruxelles, Brussels. ...

Anticipation

Anticipation is a characteristic that could possibly be used to make a machine appear conscious. An artificially conscious machine should be able to anticipate events correctly in order to be ready to respond to them when they occur. The implication here is that the machine needs real-time components, making it possible to demonstrate that it possesses artificial consciousness in the present and not just in the past. In order to do this, the machine being tested must operate coherently in an unpredictable environment, to simulate the real world.

Subjective experience

Subjective experience or qualia is widely considered to be the hard problem of consciousness. Indeed, it is held to pose a challenge to physicalism, let alone computationalism. Redness is the canonical quale. ... Unsolved problems in cognitive science: How is it possible to resolve the Hard Problem? The term hard problem of consciousness, coined by David Chalmers[1][2], refers to the hard problem of explaining why we have qualitative phenomenal experiences. ... The term physicalism was coined by Otto Neurath, in a series of early 20th century essays on the subject, in which he wrote According to physicalism, the language of physics is the universal language of science and, consequently, any knowledge can be brought back to the statements on the physical... A computer is a device or machine for processing information from data according to a program — a compiled list of instructions. ...

Schools of thought

There are several commonly stated views regarding the plausibility and capability of AC, and the likelihood that AC will ever be real consciousness. Some say the thermostat is really conscious, but they do not claim the thermostat is capable of an appreciation of music. In an interview [6] Chalmers called his statement that thermostat is conscious "very speculative" and he is not a keen proponent of panpsychism. (Chalmers 1996, p. 298) Interpretations like that are possible because of deliberately loose definitions, but tend to be too restrictive to have any significant intellectual value. Panpsychism, in philosophy, is either the view that all parts of matter involve mind, or the more holistic view that the whole universe is an organism that possesses a mind. ...

Artificial Consciousness must not be as genuine as Strong AI, it must be as objective as the scientific method demands and capable of achieving known objectively observable abilities of consciousness, except subjective experience, which by Thomas Nagel cannot be objectively observed. In the philosophy of artificial intelligence, strong AI is the supposition that some forms of artificial intelligence can truly reason and solve problems; strong AI supposes that it is possible for machines to become sapient, or self-aware, but may or may not exhibit human-like thought processes. ... Scientific method is a body of techniques for investigating phenomena, acquiring new knowledge, or correcting and integrating previous knowledge. ... Thomas Nagel (born July 4, 1937, in Belgrade, Serbia) is University Professor of Philosophy and Law at New York University and member of the Board of Editors of Encyclopædia Britannica. ...

Nihilistic view

It is impossible to test if anything is conscious. To ask a thermometer to appreciate music is like asking a human to think in five dimensions. It is unnecessary for humans to think in five dimensions, as much as it is irrelevant for thermometers to understand music. According to the nihilistic view, consciousness is just a word attributed to things that appear to make their own choices and perhaps things that are too complex for our mind to comprehend. Things seem to be conscious, but that is just because our ethical attitudes require a conscious-not conscious distinction, or because of our empathy with other entities. Consciousness is an optional perspective or social construct. (Compare with Daniel Dennett's "intentional stance", and eliminativism). Not to be confused with Pity, Sympathy, or Compassion. ... Social scientists and literary scholars have claimed that many things are social constructions or social constructs, or that they have been socially constructed. ... Daniel Clement Dennett (born March 28, 1942 in Boston, Massachusetts) is a prominent American philosopher whose research centers on philosophy of mind, philosophy of science and philosophy of biology, particularly as those fields relate to evolutionary biology and cognitive science. ... The Intentional Stance is a theory of mental content proposed, developed and championed by the American philosopher Daniel C. Dennett. ... In the philosophy of mind, eliminative materialism is the school of thought that argues for an absolute version of materialism and physicalism with respect to mental entities and mental vocabulary. ...

Alternative views

One alternative view states that it is possible for a human to deny its own existence and thereby, presumably, its own consciousness. That a machine might cogently discuss Descartes' argument "I think, therefore I am", would be some evidence in favor of the machine's consciousness. However, if it discussed the proposition as a symbolic argument it would be all too human. The original proposition was an affirmation that conscious experience simply exists - we cannot deny it, because the denial is part of conscious experience. A conscious machine could even argue that because it is a machine, it cannot be conscious in the same way as a human being who had misunderstood the difference between symbolic argument and experience might argue this. Consciousness does not imply unfailing logical ability. The richness or completeness of consciousness, degrees of consciousness, and many other related topics are under discussion, and will be so for some time (possibly forever). That one entity's consciousness is less "advanced" than another's does not prevent each from considering its own consciousness rich and complete.^{[original research?]} “Descartes” redirects here. ... René Descartes (1596-1650) The Latin phrase cogito ergo sum (I think, therefore I am) is possibly the single best-known philosophical statement and is attributed to René Descartes. ... Logic (from Classical Greek λόγος logos; meaning word, thought, idea, argument, account, reason, or principle) is the study of the principles and criteria of valid inference and demonstration. ...

Today's computers are not generally considered conscious. A Unix (or derivative thereof) computer's response to the wc -w command, reporting the number of words in a text file, is not a particularly compelling manifestation of consciousness. However, the response to the top command, in which the computer reports in a real-time continuous fashion each of the tasks it is or is not busy on, how much spare CPU power is available, etc., is a particular if very limited manifestation of self-awareness and, if we define consciousness as behavioural evidence of self-awareness, this could indeed be called consciousness.^{[original research?]} Filiation of Unix and Unix-like systems Unix (officially trademarked as UNIX®) is a computer operating system originally developed in 1969 by a group of AT&T employees at Bell Labs including Ken Thompson, Dennis Ritchie and Douglas McIlroy. ...

Artificial consciousness as a field of study

Artificial consciousness includes research aiming to create and study artificially conscious systems in order to understand corresponding natural mechanisms. This article is about the concept. ...

The term "artificial consciousness" was used by several scientists including Professor Igor Aleksander, a faculty member at the Imperial College in London, England, who stated in his book Impossible Minds that the principles for creating a conscious machine already existed but that it would take forty years to train such a machine to understand language. Understanding a language does not mean understand the language you are using. Dogs may understand up to 200 words, but may not be able to demonstrate to everyone that they can do so. Igor Aleksander is currently (2005) an emeritus professor of Neural Systems Engineering at Department of Electrical and Electronic Engineering at Imperial College, London. ... Royal School of Mines Entrance Imperial College London is a college of the University of London which focuses on science and technology, and is located in South Kensington in London. ... This article is about the capital of England and the United Kingdom. ... For other uses, see England (disambiguation). ...

Digital sentience has so far been an elusive goal, and a vague and poorly understood one at that. Since the 1950s, computer scientists, mathematicians, philosophers, and science fiction authors have debated the meaning, possibilities and the question of what would constitute digital sentience.^{[original research?]} Leonhard Euler, considered one of the greatest mathematicians of all time A mathematician is a person whose primary area of study and research is the field of mathematics. ... Science fiction is a form of speculative fiction principally dealing with the impact of imagined science and technology, or both, upon society and persons as individuals. ... For other uses, see Author (disambiguation). ...

At this time analog holographic sentience modeled after humans is more likely to be a successful approach.^{[original research?]}

Practical approaches

AC research has moved beyond the realm of philosophy; several serious attempts are underway to instill consciousness in machines. Three of these are described below.

Franklin’s Intelligent Distribution Agent

Stan Franklin (1995, 2003) defines an autonomous agent as possessing functional consciousness when it is capable of several of the functions of consciousness as identified by Bernard Baars’ Global Workspace Theory (Baars 1988), (Baars 1997). His brain child IDA (Intelligent Distribution Agent) is a software implementation of GWT, which makes it functionally conscious by definition. IDA’s task is to negotiate new assignments for sailors in the US Navy after they end a tour of duty, by matching each individual’s skills and preferences with the Navy’s needs. IDA interacts with Navy databases and communicates with the sailors via natural language email dialog while obeying a large set of Navy policies. The IDA computational model was developed during 1996-2001 at Stan Franklin’s "Conscious" Software Research Group at the University of Memphis. It "consists of approximately a quarter-million lines of Java code, and almost completely consumes the resources of a 2001 high-end workstation." It relies heavily on codelets, which are "special purpose, relatively independent, mini-agent[s] typically implemented as a small piece of code running as a separate thread." In IDA’s top-down architecture, high-level cognitive functions are explicitly modeled; see Franklin (1995) and Franklin (2003) for details. While IDA is functionally conscious by definition, Franklin does “not attribute phenomenal consciousness to [his] own 'conscious' software agent, IDA, in spite of her many human-like behaviours. This in spite of watching several US Navy detailers repeatedly nodding their heads saying 'Yes, that’s how I do it' while watching IDA’s internal and external actions as she performs her task." Stan Franklin is W. Harry Feinstone Interdisciplinary Research Professor at the University of Memphis, TN and co-director of the Institute of Intelligent Systems. ... An autonomous agent is a system situated in, and part of, an environment, which senses that environment, and acts on it, over time, in pursuit of its own agenda. ... Consciousness is a quality of the mind generally regarded to comprise qualities such as subjectivity, self-awareness, sentience, sapience, and the ability to perceive the relationship between oneself and ones environment. ... Bernard J. Baars is a senior fellow of the Neurosciences Institute in La Jolla, CA. He is best known for his book, A Cognitive Theory of Consciousness (1988) in which he outlines his view of Global Workspace Theory as a model for consciousness. ... Global Workspace Theory (GWT) was proposed by Bernard Baars (1988, 1997). ... “Java language” redirects here. ... Consciousness is a quality of the mind generally regarded to comprise qualities such as subjectivity, self-awareness, sentience, sapience, and the ability to perceive the relationship between oneself and ones environment. ...

Ron Sun's cognitive architecture CLARION

CLARION posits a two-level representation that explains the distinction between conscious and unconscioue mental processes.

CLARION has been successful in accounting for a variety of psychological data. A number of well-known skill learning tasks have been simulated using CLARION that span the spectrum ranging from simple reactive skills to complex cognitive skills. The tasks include serial reaction time (SRT) tasks, artificial grammar learning (AGL) tasks, process control (PC) tasks, the categorical inference (CI) task, the alphabetical arithmetic (AA) task, and the Tower of Hanoi (TOH) task (Sun 2002). Among them, SRT, AGL, and PC are typical implicit learning tasks, very much relevant to the issue of consciousness as they operationalized the notion of consciousness in the context of psychological experiments .

The simulations using CLARION provide detailed, process-based interpretations of experimental data related to consciousness, in the context of a broadly scoped cognitive architecture and a unified theory of cognition. Such interpretations are important for a precise, process-based understanding of consciousness and other aspects of cognition, leading up to better appreciations of the role of consciousness in human cognition (Sun 1999). CLARION also makes quantitative and qualitative predictions regarding cognition in the areas of memory, learning, motivation, metacognition, and so on. These predictions either have been experimentally tested already or are in the process of being tested

See http://www.cogsci.rpi.edu/~rsun/conscious.html

Haikonen’s cognitive architecture

Pentti Haikonen (2003) considers classical rule-based computing inadequate for achieving AC: "the brain is definitely not a computer. Thinking is not an execution of programmed strings of commands. The brain is not a numerical calculator either. We do not think by numbers." Rather than trying to achieve mind and consciousness by identifying and implementing their underlying computational rules, Haikonen proposes "a special cognitive architecture to reproduce the processes of perception, inner imagery, inner speech, pain, pleasure, emotions and the cognitive functions behind these. This bottom-up architecture would produce higher-level functions by the power of the elementary processing units, the artificial neurons, without algorithms or programs". Haikonen believes that, when implemented with sufficient complexity, this architecture will develop consciousness, which he considers to be "a style and way of operation, characterized by distributed signal representation, perception process, cross-modality reporting and availability for retrospection." Haikonen is not alone in this process view of consciousness, or the view that AC will spontaneously emerge in autonomous agents that have a suitable neuro-inspired architecture of complexity; these are shared by many, e.g. Freeman (1999) and Cotterill (2003). A low-complexity implementation of the architecture proposed by Haikonen (2004) was reportedly not capable of AC, but did exhibit emotions as expected. For other uses, see Mind (disambiguation). ... Consciousness is a quality of the mind generally regarded to comprise qualities such as subjectivity, self-awareness, sentience, sapience, and the ability to perceive the relationship between oneself and ones environment. ... A cognitive architecture is a blueprint for intelligent agents. ... In computing, a process is, roughly speaking, a task being run by a computer, often simultaneously with many other tasks. ... In psychology and the cognitive sciences, perception is the process of acquiring, interpreting, selecting, and organizing sensory information. ... “Hurting” redirects here. ... Look up Pleasure in Wiktionary, the free dictionary. ... Its over and done But the heartache lives on inside And who is the one your clinging to instead of me tonight And where are you now Now that I need you Tears on my pillow Wherever you go Cry me a river that leads to your oceans Youll never... Cognitive The scientific study of how people obtain, retrieve, store and manipulate information. ... An artificial neuron (also called a node or Nv neuron or Binary neuron or McCulloch-Pitts neuron) is an abstraction of biological neurons and the basic unit in an artificial neural network. ... Flowcharts are often used to represent algorithms. ... A computer program is a collection of instructions that describe a task, or set of tasks, to be carried out by a computer. ... An autonomous agent is a system situated in, and part of, an environment, which senses that environment, and acts on it, over time, in pursuit of its own agenda. ...

Testing for artificial consciousness

Unless artificial consciousness can be proven formally, judgments of the success of any implementation will depend on observation. Image File history File links Broom_icon. ...

The Turing test is a proposal for identifying machine intelligence as determined by a machine's ability to interact with a person. In the Turing test one has to guess whether the entity one is interacting with is a machine or a human, without any visual clues — the conversation is usually held over a terminal. An artificially conscious entity could only pass an equivalent test when it had itself passed beyond the imaginations of observers and entered into a meaningful relationship with them, and perhaps with fellow instances of itself. For the Doctor Who novel named after the test, see The Turing Test (novel). ... Intelligence is the mental capacity to reason, plan, solve problems, think abstractly, comprehend ideas and language, and learn. ... In the context of telecommunications, a terminal is a device which is capable of communicating over a line. ...

A cat or dog would not be able to pass this test. It is highly likely that consciousness is not an exclusive property of humans. Therefore, it is possible that a machine could be conscious and not be able to pass the Turing test. However, it would probably be a serendipitous occurrence because most efforts in artificial intelligence are focussed on intelligence and cognition rather than consciousness. Look up Serendipity in Wiktionary, the free dictionary. ... Bold text[[Link title]] “AI” redirects here. ... For other uses, see Intelligence (disambiguation). ... Look up Cognition in Wiktionary, the free dictionary. ...

As mentioned above, the Chinese room argument seeks to debunk the validity of the Turing Test by showing that a machine can pass the test and yet not have human-style semantics. This article or section does not cite its references or sources. ...

Since there is an enormous range of human behaviours, all of which are deemed to be conscious, it is difficult to lay down all the criteria by which to determine whether a machine manifests consciousness.

Furthermore, many would argue that no test of behaviour can prove or disprove the existence of consciousness because a conscious entity can have dreams, qualia and other features of an inner life. This point is made forcibly by those who stress the subjective nature of conscious experience such as Thomas Nagel who, in his essay, What is it like to be a bat?, argues that subjective experience cannot be reduced, because it cannot be objectively observed, but subjective experience is not in contradiction with physicalism. Dreaming is the subjective experience of imaginary images, sounds/voices, thoughts or sensations during sleep, usually involuntarily. ... Redness is the canonical quale. ... Thomas Nagel (born July 4, 1937, in Belgrade, Serbia) is University Professor of Philosophy and Law at New York University and member of the Board of Editors of Encyclopædia Britannica. ... The sensory buzz and awareness associated with a conscious mind is often called subjective experience. ...

Although objective criteria are being proposed as prerequisites for testing the consciousness of a machine, the failure of any particular test would not disprove consciousness. Ultimately it will only be possible to assess whether a machine is conscious when a universally accepted understanding of consciousness is available.

Another test of AC, in the opinion of some, should include a demonstration that machine can learn the ability to filter out certain stimuli in its environment, to focus on certain stimuli, and to show attention toward its environment in general. The mechanisms that govern how human attention is driven are not yet fully understood by scientists. This absence of knowledge could be exploited by engineers of AC; since we don't understand attentiveness in humans, we do not have specific and known criteria to measure it in machines. Since unconsciousness in humans equates to total inattentiveness, an AC should have outputs that indicate where its attention is focused at any one time, at least during the aforementioned test. By Antonio Chella from University of Palermo [7] "The mapping between the conceptual and the linguistic areas gives the interpretation of linguistic symbols in terms of conceptual structures. It is achieved through a focus of attention mechanism implemented by means of suitable recurrent neural networks with internal states. A sequential attentive mechanism is hypothesized that suitably scans the conceptual representation and, according to the hypotheses generated on the basis of previous knowledge, it predicts and detects the interesting events occurring in the scene. Hence, starting from the incoming information, such a mechanism generates expectations and it makes contexts in which hypotheses may be verified and, if necessary, adjusted." In physiology, a stimulus is a detectable change in the internal or external environment. ... In philosophy, mechanism is a theory that all natural phenomena can be explained by physical causes. ...

Another test for consciousness, commonly proposed by some futurists such as transhumanists, is to hook the human brain up to a machine in an integral way. Presently, brain-computer interfaces are fairly primitive, and only allow for information to be channeled in to or out of the human brain, but not both ways due to the massive computational complexity this would require of the computer and bandwidth restrictions. However, as BCIs continue to progress in complexity and functionality along with the continuing study of AC, it may be perfectly reasonable to propose to hook two human brains together in such a way that both individuals would be able to share their conscious experiences. This technique might be described as the ultimate test of subjective sentience, because unlike the development of an objective definition of consciousness, this sort of integral cognition would allow one subjectively conscious human to report the existence or non-existence of a conscious mind in a computer. Wikipedia does not yet have an article with this exact name. ... // A brain-computer interface (BCI), sometimes called a direct neural interface or a brain-machine interface, is a direct communication pathway between a human or animal brain (or brain cell culture) and an external device. ...

The ethics of artificial consciousness

If it was certain that a particular machine was conscious its rights would be an ethical issue that would need to be assessed (e.g. what rights it would have under law). For example a conscious computer that was owned and used as a tool or central computer of a building or large machine is a particular ambiguity. Should laws be made for such a case, consciousness would also require a legal definition (for example a machine's ability to experience pleasure or pain). Because artificial consciousness is still largely a theoretical subject such ethics have not been discussed or developed to a great extent, though it has often been a theme in fiction (see below). Image File history File links This is a lossless scalable vector image. ... For other uses, see Ethics (disambiguation). ... For other uses, see Law (disambiguation). ... Look up Pleasure in Wiktionary, the free dictionary. ... “Hurting” redirects here. ...

Rights as of 2003:

The rules for the 2003 Loebner Prize competition explicitly addressed the question of "Robot Rights." The Loebner Prize is an annual competition that awards prizes to the Chatterbot considered by the judges to be the most humanlike of those entered. ...

61. If, in any given year, a publicly available open source Entry entered by the University of Surrey or the Cambridge Center wins the Silver Medal or the Gold Medal, then the Medal and the Cash Award will be awarded to the body responsible the development of that Entry. If no such body can be identified, or if there is disagreement among two or more claimants, the Medal and the Cash Award will be held in trust until such time as the Entry may legally possess, either in the United States of America or in the venue of the contest, the Cash Award and Gold Medal in its own right.

http://loebner03.hamill.co.uk/docs/LPC%20Official%20Rules%20v2.0.pdf

The competition was directed by David Hamill and the rules were developed by members of the Robitron Yahoo group. The suggestion for granting rights to the AI was made in http://tech.groups.yahoo.com/group/Robitron/message/687

Artificial consciousness in literature and movies

Fictional future history instances of artificial consciousness: Image File history File links Emblem-important. ... Image File history File links Emblem-important. ... This is a sub-article of Artificial intelligence (AI), describing the different futuristic portrayals of fictional artificial intelligence. ... Universe was a 1941 story from Heinleins Future History series (shown here in the 1951 Dell edition). ...

• Neuromancer and Wintermute from William Gibson's "Neuromancer".
• Aura from the .hack// series.
• Chii from the Chobits anime series.
• Skynet from The Terminator series of films.
• The Netnavis from Megaman NT Warrior
• Vanamonde in Arthur C. Clarke's The City and the Stars
• The Ship (the result of a large-scale AC experiment) in Frank Herbert's Destination: Void and sequels, despite past edicts warning against "Making a Machine in the Image of a Man's Mind."
• Jane in Orson Scott Card's Speaker for the Dead, Xenocide, Children of the Mind, and Investment Counselor
• HAL 9000 in 2001: A Space Odyssey
• David in Steven Spielberg's A.I.: Artificial Intelligence
• Data in Star Trek
• P-1 in the 1970's book The Adolesence of P-1
• Robots in Isaac Asimov's Robot Series
• Andrew Martin in The Bicentennial Man
• Blade Runner
• The Matrix
• The Technocore in Dan Simmons' Hyperion and Endymion series (see Hyperion Cantos)
• The Minds in Iain M. Bank's Culture novels.
• The Sentient Intelligence in Peter F. Hamilton's Commonwealth Saga and sequel.
• Johnny 5 in Short Circuit and sequel.
• Many of Robert A. Heinlein's short stories and novels feature AI/AC plots and discussion. See The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress (co-starring a networked supercomputer named Mike), Time Enough for Love (Minerva/Athena, another world-spanning computer), The Number of the Beast (The Gay Deceiver, a supernaturally-altered personal flying craft) and, arguably, the eponymous heroine in Friday.
• The Bomb in Dark Star
• Kryten and Holly in Red Dwarf
• Durandal, Tycho, and Leela from the Marathon Trilogy
• Many of the characters in Mamoru Oushi's Ghost in the Shell
• KITT and KARR from Knight Rider (Note that it was only hinted that K.I.T.T. had essentially a mind of his own and can 'think'. However K.A.R.R. was to be exactly like K.I.T.T. but was said to be more 'animalistic' in nature.)

The introduction to this article provides insufficient context for those unfamiliar with the subject matter. ... Serialized in Young Magazine Original run 2001 – 2002 No. ... SkyNET, also known as The Terminator: SkyNET in Europe, is a computer game based on the Terminator film series. ... The Terminator (also known as Terminator in some early trailers and posters) is a 1984 science fiction/action film featuring former bodybuilder Arnold Schwarzenegger in what would become his best-known role, and also starred Linda Hamilton and Michael Biehn. ... Derived from the term Internet Navigator, a NetNavi (ネットナビ Nettonabi) is a key concept in the Mega Man Battle Network series of video games, developed by Capcom, as well as the MegaMan NT Warrior (Rockman EXE) anime and manga. ... MegaMan NT Warrior , RockMan. ... Sir Arthur Charles Clarke, CBE (born 16 December 1917) is a British science-fiction author and inventor, most famous for his novel 2001: A Space Odyssey, and for collaborating with director Stanley Kubrick on the film of the same name. ... The City and The Stars (1956) is a science fiction novel by Arthur C. Clarke. ... Frank Patrick Herbert (October 8, 1920 – February 11, 1986) was a critically acclaimed and commercially successful American science fiction author. ... Destination: Void, a novel by the American science fiction author Frank Herbert (1920-1986). ... In Orson Scott Cards Ender series, Jane is an artificial sentience thought to exist within the ansible network by which spaceships and planets communicate instantly across galactic distances. ... The tone or style of this article or section may not be appropriate for Wikipedia. ... Speaker for the Dead (1986) is a science fiction novel by Orson Scott Card and a sequel to the novel Enders Game. ... For the computer game related to X-COM: UFO Defense, see Project Xenocide. ... Children of the Mind is the fourth book of Orson Scott Cards popular Enders Game series, a series of four science fiction novels that focus on Ender Wiggin himself. ... Investment Counselor is a science fiction short story by Orson Scott Card. ... HAL 9000 (Heuristically programmed ALgorithmic computer) is a fictional character in Arthur C. Clarkes Space Odyssey saga. ... A movie poster from the original release of 2001 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968) is an immensely popular and influential science fiction film and book; the film directed by Stanley Kubrick and the book written by Arthur C. Clarke. ... Steven Allan Spielberg (born December 18, 1946)[1] is an American film director and producer. ... A.I.: Artificial Intelligence (2001) was the last project that filmmaker Stanley Kubrick worked on. ... Data[1] is a character, portrayed by Brent Spiner, in the Star Trek fictional universe. ... The current Star Trek franchise logo Star Trek is an American science fiction entertainment series and media franchise. ... Isaac Asimov (January 2?, 1920?[1] – April 6, 1992), IPA: , originally Исаак Озимов but now transcribed into Russian as Айзек Азимов) was a Russian-born American Jewish author and professor of biochemistry, a highly successful and exceptionally prolific writer best known for his works of science fiction and for his popular science books. ... Isaac Asimovs Robot Series is a series of books by Isaac Asimov, both collections of short stories and novels. ... The Bicentennial Man is a novella in the Robot Series by Isaac Asimov. ... This article is about the 1982 film. ... This article is about the 1999 film. ... Dan Simmons (born April 4, 1948 in Peoria, Illinois) is an American author most widely known for his Hugo Award-winning science fiction novel Hyperion and its sequel The Fall of Hyperion. ... Hyperion The Hyperion Cantos form a tetralogy of science fiction novels by Dan Simmons. ... In Iain M. Banks Culture novels, starships, planets and orbitals have their own Minds: self-conscious, hyperintelligent machines originally built by humanoid species but which have evolved, redesigned themselves, outsmarted their creators by several orders of magnitude since then. ... Iain Menzies Banks (born on February 16, 1954 in Dunfermline, Fife, Scotland) writes mainstream novels as Iain Banks and science fiction as Iain M. Banks. ... The Culture is a fictional anarchic, socialistic and utopian society created by the Scottish writer Iain Banks and described by him in several of his novels and shorter fictions. ... Peter F. Hamilton Peter F. Hamilton Peter F. Hamilton (born 1960, Rutland, England), is a British science fiction author. ... The Commonwealth Saga is a series of science fiction novels by British science fiction writer Peter F. Hamilton. ... For alternate meanings see Short circuit (disambiguation) A short circuit (sometimes known as simply a short) is a fault whereby electricity moves through a circuit in an unintended path, usually due to a connection forming where none was expected. ... Robert Anson Heinlein (July 7, 1907 – May 8, 1988) was one of the most popular, influential, and controversial authors of hard science fiction. ... The Moon Is A Harsh Mistress cover The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress is a 1966 science fiction novel by Robert A. Heinlein about a lunar penal colonys revolt against rule from Earth. ... Time Enough for Love is a science fiction novel by Robert A. Heinlein published in 1973. ... The Number of the Beast may refer to: the number 666, a biblical allusion to the Book of Revelation The Number of the Beast, a novel by Robert Heinlein The Number of the Beast, an album and song by Iron Maiden The Number of the Beast is the name of... Friday is a 1982 science fiction novel by Robert A. Heinlein. ... The terms Dark Star or Darkstar may refer to: Dark star, a theoretical star whose gravity is strong enough to trap light, mostly superseded by the concept of black holes. RQ-3 Dark Star, a military drone developed by the United States Dark Star (band), an English rock band Dark... For the type of star, see Red dwarf. ... The Marathon Trilogy is a science fiction series of first-person shooter computer games from Bungie Software, originally released for the Macintosh. ... Motoko Kusanagi from the manga Ghost in the Shell. ... KITT on display at Universal Studios. ... KARR from the episode KARR (the Knight Automated Roving Robot), is a villain from the Knight Rider television series. ... For the American media company, see Knight Ridder. ...

See also

// A brain-computer interface (BCI), sometimes called a direct neural interface or a brain-machine interface, is a direct communication pathway between a human or animal brain (or brain cell culture) and an external device. ... Epiphenomenalism is a view in philosophy of mind according to which some or all mental states are mere epiphenomena (side-effects or by-products) of physical states of the world. ... Greedy reductionism is a term coined by Daniel Dennett, in the book Darwins Dangerous Idea, to distinguish between acceptable and erroneous forms of reductionism. ... The identity of indiscernibles is an ontological principle; i. ... To meet Wikipedias quality standards, this article may require cleanup. ... Jabberwacky is a chatterbot created by British programmer Rollo Carpenter. ... Kismet now resides at the MIT Museum in Cambridge, MA Kismet is a robot at MIT with auditory, visual and expressive systems intended to participate in human social interaction and to demonstrate simulated human emotion and appearance. ... Coined by 19th-century British psychologist C. Lloyd Morgan, Morgans Canon (more usually called Lloyd Morgans Canon, or occasionally Morgans Canon of Interpretation) remains a fundamental precept of comparative (animal) psychology. ... A Phrenological mapping of the brain. ... Virtual Woman is a software program that combines elements of a chatterbot, virtual reality, artificial intelligence, a video game, and a virtual human. ... W. Grey Walter (February 19, 1910 - May 6, 1977) was a neurophysiologist and robotician. ...

References

• Aleksander, Igor (1995), Artificial Neuroconsciousness: An Update, IWANN, <http://www.ee.ic.ac.uk/research/neural/publications/iwann.html>
• Baars, Bernard (1988), A Cognitive Theory of Consciousness, Cambridge, MA: Cambridge University Press, <http://www.nsi.edu/users/baars/BaarsConsciousnessBook1988/CTC_ch01.html>
• Baars, Bernard (1997), In the Theater of Consciousness, New York, NY: Oxford University Press
• Chalmers, David (1996), The Conscious Mind, Oxford University Press.
• Cotterill, Rodney (2003), "Cyberchild: a Simulation Test-Bed for Consciousness Studies", in Holland, Owen, Machine Consciousness, Imprint Academic
• Franklin, Stan (1995), Artificial Minds, Boston, MA: MIT Press
• Franklin, Stan (2003), "IDA: A Conscious Artefact", in Holland, Owen, Machine Consciousness, Exeter, UK: Imprint Academic
• Freeman, Walter (1999), How Brains make up their Minds, Phoenix
• Haikonen, Pentti (2003), The Cognitive Approach to Conscious Machines, Imprint Academic
• Sun, Ron (December 1999), "Accounting for the computational basis of consciousness: A connectionist approach", Consciousness and Cognition 8
• Sun, Ron (2001), "Computation, reduction, and teleology of consciousness", Cognitive Systems Research 1 (4): 241-249
• Takeno, Junichi; K Inaba & T. Suzuki (June 27-30, 2005), "Experiments and examination of mirror image cognition using a small robot", The 6th IEEE International Symposium on Computational Intelligence in Robotics and Automation (CIRA 2005): 493-498, <http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/xpl/freeabs_all.jsp?arnumber=1554325>

Further reading

• Haikonen, Pentti (2004), Conscious Machines and Machine Emotions, presented at Workshop on Models for Machine Consciousness, Antwerp, BE, June 2004.
• Baars, Bernard J and Stan Franklin. 2003. How conscious experience and working memory interact. Trends in Cognitive Science 7: 166–172.
• Franklin, S, B J Baars, U Ramamurthy, and Matthew Ventura. 2005. The role of consciousness in memory. Brains, Minds and Media 1: 1–38, pdf.
• Casti, John L. "The Cambridge Quintet: A Work of Scientific Speculation", Perseus Books Group , 1998
• McCarthy, John (1971-1987), Generality in Artificial Intelligence [8]. Stanford University, 1971-1987.
• Suzuki T., Inaba K., Takeno, Junichi (2005), Conscious Robot That Distinguishes Between Self and Others and Implements Imitation Behavior, ( Best Paper of IEA/AIE2005), Innovations in Applied Artificial Intelligence, 18th International Conference on Industrial and Engineering Applications of Artificial Intelligence and Expert Systems, pp. 101-110, IEA/AIE 2005, Bari, Italy, June 22-24, 2005.
• Takeno, Junichi (2006), The Self-Aware Robot -A Response to Reactions to Discovery News- [9], HRI Press, August 2006.
• Sternberg, Eliezer J. (2007) Are You a Machine? Tha Brain the Mind and What it Means to be Human. Amherst, NY: Prometheus Books.
• Wikibook on consciousness

External links

• http://news.softpedia.com/news/What-s-the-Difference-Between-You-and-Your-Dog-15121.shtml What's the Difference Between You and Your Dog?] Understanding what consciousness is by playing hide-and-seek
• Are People Computers? Strong AI, The Simulation Argument and Naive Realism
• The Rights of Consciousness
• Humanoid Robotics Ethical Considerations
• Scientific Ethics
• Artefactual consciousness depiction by Professor Igor Aleksander
• Proposed mechanisms for AC implemented by computer program: absolutely dynamic systems
• http://www.consciousentities.com
• David Chalmers
• Course notes/slides on Neurophilosophy
• ESF Models of Consciousness Workshop and its Scientific Report
• Machine Consciousness - Complexity Aspects Workshop
• Anton P. Zeleznikar's Home Page
• Robot In Touch with Its Emotions 5-Sep-2005
• Robot Demonstrates Self-awareness 21-Dec-2005
• The World First Self-Aware Robot and the Success of Mirror Image Cognition (Lecture at the Karlsruhe University and the Munich University, Germany), 8-Nov.-2006.
• www.Conscious-Robots.com - Internet Portal dedicated to Machine Consciousness
• The Institute for Advanced Science & Engineering
• www.senses.info Steven Ericsson-Zenith's Explaining Experience in Nature information site.