A "Consciousness"-Based Architecture for a Functioning Mind

Abstract

Here we describe an architecture for an autonomous software agent designed to model a broad spectrum of human cognitive and affective functioning. In addition to featuring “consciousness,” the architecture accommodates perception, several forms of memory, emotions, action-selection, deliberation, ersatz language generation, several forms of learning, and metacognition. One such software agent, IDA, embodying much of this architecture, is up and running. IDA’s “consciousness” module is based on global workspace theory, allowing it to select relevant resources with which to deal flexibly with both exogenous and endogenous stimuli. Within this architecture, emotions implement IDA’s drives, its1 primary motivations. Offering one possible architecture for a fully functioning artificial mind, IDA constitutes an early attempt at the exploration of design space and niche space. The design of the IDA architecture spawns hypotheses concerning human cognition and affect that can serve to guide the research of cognitive scientists and neuroscientists. One such hypothesis is that consciousness is discrete.