Creatures that display ‘hedonic place preference behaviour’ are thought by many scientists to experience feelings, on the assumption that their attraction to pleasure-producing substances which lack nutritional value (e.g. cocaine, morphine) cannot easily be attributed to unconscious instinctual behaviour. In this paper, we discuss how a simple artificial agent that instantiates attributes of...
This chapter addresses the difficult scientific and philosophical challenge of engineering and then verifying consciousness within artificial agents. Moving beyond traditional focuses on perception and cognition, the authors argue that ‘affect’ – the raw capacity for feeling – is the fundamental form of consciousness. By defining consciousness as a subjective state rooted in an extended form of...