A COMPUTATIONAL MODEL OF MACHINE CONSCIOUSNESS

Abstract

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 model it in intelligent machines. We propose a computational model of consciousness driven by competing motivations, goals, and attention-switching. We propose a concept of mental saccades that is useful for explaining the attention-switching and focusing mechanism from computational perspective. Finally, we compare our model with other computational models of consciousness.