International Journal of Machine Consciousness
December 1, 2012
David Gamez
26 citations
Research is starting to identify correlations between consciousness and some of the spatiotemporal patterns in the physical brain. For theoretical and practical reasons, the results of experiments on the correlates of consciousness have ambiguous interpretations. At any point in time a number of hypotheses co-exist about and the correlates of consciousness in the brain, which are all compatible...
International Journal of Machine Consciousness
December 1, 2011
Janusz A. Starzyk, Dilip Kumar Prasad
52 citations
Despite many efforts, there are no computational models of consciousness that can be used to design conscious intelligent machines. This is mainly attributed to available definitions of consciousness being human centered, vague, and incomplete. Through a biological analysis of consciousness and concept of machine intelligence, we propose a physical definition of consciousness with the hope to...
International Journal of Machine Consciousness
June 1, 2011
Wendell Wallach, Colin Allen, Stan Franklin
36 citations
What roles or functions does consciousness fulfill in the making of moral decisions? Will artificial agents capable of making appropriate decisions in morally charged situations require machine consciousness? Should the capacity to make moral decisions be considered an attribute essential for being designated a fully conscious agent? Research on the prospects for developing machines capable of...
International Journal of Machine Consciousness
June 1, 2011
K. Thomsen
15 citations
The Ouroboros Model features a biologically inspired cognitive architecture. At its core lies a self-referential recursive process with alternating phases of data acquisition and evaluation. Memory entries are organized in schemata. The activation at a time of part of a schema biases the whole structure and, in particular, missing features, thus triggering expectations. An iterative recursive...
International Journal of Machine Consciousness
June 1, 2011
Alfredo Pereira, Leonardo Ferreira Almada
13 citations
In the book Conceptual Spaces: the Geometry of Thought [2000] Peter Gärdenfors proposes a new framework for cognitive science. Complementary to symbolic and subsymbolic [connectionist] descriptions, conceptual spaces are semantic structures constructed from empirical data representing the universe of mental states. We argue that Gärdenfors' modeling can be used in consciousness research to...
International Journal of Machine Consciousness
June 1, 2011
Ben Goertzel
8 citations
A novel theory of reflective consciousness, will and self is presented, based on modeling each of these entities using self-referential mathematical structures called hypersets. Pattern theory is used to argue that these exotic mathematical structures may meaningfully be considered as parts of the minds of physical systems, even finite computational systems. The hyperset models presented are...
International Journal of Machine Consciousness
June 1, 2011
Susan A. J. Stuart
7 citations
In this short paper I will introduce an idea which, I will argue, presents a fundamental additional challenge to the machine consciousness community.The idea takes the questions surrounding phenomenology, qualia and phenomenality one step further into the realm of intersubjectivity but with a twist, and the twist is this: that an agent's intersubjective experience is deeply felt and necessarily...
International Journal of Machine Consciousness
June 1, 2011
Donald S. Borrett, David J. H. Shih, Michael Tomko et al.
6 citations
A formalism is developed that treats a robot as a subject that can interpret its own experience rather than an object that is interpreted within our experience. A regulative definition of a meaningful experience in robots is proposed in which the present sensible experience is considered meaningful to the agent, as the subject of the experience, if it can be related to the agent's temporal...
International Journal of Machine Consciousness
June 1, 2011
Pierre E. Bonzon
3 citations
We present a two-level model of concurrent communicating systems (CCS) to serve as a basis formachine consciousness. A language implementing threads within logic programming is ¯rstintroduced. This high-level framework allows for the de¯nition of abstract processes that can beexecuted on a virtual machine. We then look for a possible grounding of these processes into thebrain. Towards this end,...
International Journal of Machine Consciousness
August 24, 2010
Raúl Arrabales, Agapito Ledezma, Araceli Sanchis
9 citations
The progress in the machine consciousness research fiel has to be assessed in terms of the features demonstrated by the new models and implementations currently being designed. In this paper, we focus on the functional aspects of consciousness and propose the application of a revision of ConsScale a biologically inspired scale for measuring cognitive development in artificial agents in order to...
International Journal of Machine Consciousness
June 1, 2010
Aaron Sloman
81 citations
This paper is an attempt to summarise and justify critical comments I have been making over several decades about research on consciousness by philosophers, scientists and engineers. This includes (a) explaining why the concept of “phenomenal consciousness” (P-C), in the sense defined by Ned Block, is semantically flawed and unsuitable as a target for scientific research or machine modelling,...
International Journal of Machine Consciousness
June 1, 2010
Aaron Sloman
30 citations
This paper extends three decades of work arguing that researchers who discuss consciousness should not restrict themselves only to (adult) human minds, but should study (and attempt to model) many kinds of minds, natural and artificial, thereby contributing to our understanding of the space containing all of them. We need to study what they do or can do, how they can do it, and how the natural...
International Journal of Machine Consciousness
June 1, 2010
Aaron Sloman
2 citations
This is a reply to commentaries on my article "An Alternative to Working on Machine Consciousness". Reading the commentaries caused me to write a lengthy background tutorial paper explaining some of the assumptions that were taken for granted in the target article, and pointing out various confusions regarding the notion of consciousness, including many related to its polymorphism, taken for...
International Journal of Machine Consciousness
June 1, 2010
Cristiano Castelfranchi
1 citation
After discussing a possible contradiction in Sloman's very challenging intervention, I stress the need for not identifying with phenomenal consciousness and with the qualia problem. I claim that it is necessary to distinguish different forms and functions of and to explicitly model them, also by exploiting the specific advantage of AI: to make experiments impossible in nature, by separating...
International Journal of Machine Consciousness
June 1, 2010
Roberto Cordeschi
1 citation
A comment on a target paper by A. Sloman on machine consciouness.
International Journal of Machine Consciousness
June 1, 2010
Igor Aleksander
Sloman's critique of almost all the work that goes under the heading of Machine Consciousness (MC) stems from his assertion that one cannot base a constructive science on a confused concept. This brief comment is an attempt to look at some bits of Sloman's own contribution, whether he overcomes this difficulty or whether the difficulty may be addressed through the very use of a constructive...
International Journal of Machine Consciousness
June 1, 2010
Elizabeth Irvine
Sloman suggests that although many try to model consciousness as a unitary and abstract entity, the project is an incoherent one. This claim will be supported, but it will also be argued that current movements in consciousness research are broadly consistent with Sloman's "alternative" suggestions of how best to make progress in this area.
International Journal of Machine Consciousness
June 1, 2010
Ricardo Sanz
The lack of clarity concerning the issues at stake in machine consciousness and the unclear objectives pursued by the different approaches are the main reasons behind the half-program, half-pun Sloman's proposal of an alternative approach to the problem of machine consciousness, based on the construction of a robotic phenomenologist.
International Journal of Machine Consciousness
June 1, 2010
Piotr Bołtuć
Sloman criticizes all existing attempts to define machine consciousness for being overly one-sided. He argues that such definition is not only unattainable but also unnecessary. The critique is well taken in part; yet, whatever his intended aims, by not acknowledging the non-reductive aspects of consciousness, Sloman, in fact, sides with the reductivist view.
International Journal of Machine Consciousness
December 1, 2009
David Gamez
25 citations
The question about the potential for consciousness of artificial systems has often been addressed using thought experiments, which are often problematic in the philosophy of mind. A more promising approach is to use real experiments to gather data about the correlates of consciousness in humans, and develop this data into theories that make predictions about human and artificial consciousness....
International Journal of Machine Consciousness
December 1, 2009
Pentti O. A. Haikonen
22 citations
It is argued that qualia are the primary way in which sensory information manifests itself in mind. Qualia are not seen as properties of the physical world, ready to be observed; instead it is argued that they are the way in which the sensory system's response to the sensed stimuli manifests itself inside the system. Systems that have qualia have direct and transparent access to this response....
International Journal of Machine Consciousness
December 1, 2009
Ricardo Sanz, Carlos Hernández, Jaime Gómez et al.
9 citations
The lack of a well established theory of consciousness is a major difficulty in the construction of machines that express some of the functionalities associated to them. The ASys long term project intends the construction of assets for engineering any-scale, self-aware autonomous systems. A core element in this effort is the proposal of an architecture for consciousness of general...
International Journal of Machine Consciousness
December 1, 2009
Uma Ramamurthy, Stan Franklin
6 citations
Cognitive theories of consciousness should provide effective frameworks to implement machine consciousness. The Global Workspace Theory is a leading theory of consciousness which postulates that the primary function of consciousness is a global broadcast that facilitates recruitment of internal resources to deal with the current situation as well as modulate several types of learning. In this...
International Journal of Machine Consciousness
December 1, 2009
Raúl Arrabales, Agapito Ledezma, Araceli Sanchis
5 citations
The accurate measurement of the level of consciousness of a creature remains a major scientific challenge, nevertheless a number of new accounts that attempt to address this problem have been proposed recently. In this paper we analyze the principles of these new measures of consciousness along with other classical approaches focusing on their applicability to Machine Consciousness (MC)....
International Journal of Machine Consciousness
December 1, 2009
Will Neil Browne, Richard J. Hussey
2 citations
The academic journey to a widely acknowledged Machine Consciousness is anticipated to be an emotional one. Both in terms of the active debate provoked by the subject and a hypothesised need to encapsulate an analogue of emotions in an artificial system in order to progress towards machine consciousness. This paper explores why the topic of 'emotion ' promotes debate- due to the contributing...