International Journal of Machine Consciousness

Machine consciousness is a young research field, yet inspired by oldest intellectual disciplines like philosophy of mind. Specifically, the mind–body problem has been approached since ancient times and different accounts have been proposed along the centuries. While none of these accounts, like different forms of dualism, have been seen as useful working hypotheses in the domain of machine consciousness, their influence might have shaped the orientation of this research field towards a frantic search for an illusory and unachievable bridge for the explanatory gap. In his book, Consciousness and Robot Sentience, Haikonen seems to claim back the predominant position that engineering should have in a domain, where we are supposed to deliver pragmatic solutions. In this regard, Haikonen is actually bridging the gap between the philosophical discourse and the practical engineering approach. This is a remarkable movement as Haikonen is essentially claiming that his cognitive architecture is a proof of the inexistence of such a thing as a mind–body problem. In this book review, I analyze the implications, limitations, and prospects of this engineering stance, looking at the main contributions and those aspects that might require further explanation.

A critique of some central themes in Pentti Haikonen's recent book, Consciousness and Robot Sentience, is offered. Haikonen maintains that the crucial question concerning consciousness is how the inner workings of the brain or an artificial system can appear, not as inner workings, but as subjective experience. It is argued here that Haikonen's own account fails to answer this question, and that the question is not in fact the right one to ask anyway. It is argued that making the required changes to the question reveals an important lacuna in Haikonen's explanation of consciousness.

According to Aleksander and Morton's informational mind hypothesis, conscious minds are state structures that are created through iconic learning. Distributed representations of colors, edges, objects, etc. are linked with proprioceptive and motor information to generate the awareness of an out-there world. The uniqueness and indivisibility of these iconically learned states reflect the uniqueness and indivisibility of the world. This article summarizes the key claims of the informational mind hypothesis and considers them in relation to Tononi's information integration theory of consciousness. Some suggestions are made about how the informational mind hypothesis could be experimentally tested, and its significance for work on machine consciousness is considered.

This book is both a history of attempts to understand consciousness, and a presentation of the authors' own theory. The history is well written and informative. The theory has some intriguing aspects, based on how a neurally controlled agent might locate itself in space. But for the most part they base their theory of consciousness on Giulio Tononi's proposal that sensations are trajectories of a neural system through a very high-dimensional state space. Because it is never explained how such a state space could influence verbal reports of the qualia of sensations, the theory leaves consciousness as a sort of vapor misting around the brain while waiting for a precise specification of its causal role.

The two extant books in the machine consciousness series address two topics of major importance to the machine consciousness community: The informational nature of minds and the substrates for robot sentience. I will summarily review both texts to conclude that they offer two enjoyable perspectives of a common topic: Consciousness is an emerging property of epistemic control loops.

Five reviewers have kindly read our "Aristotle's Laptop: Discovering our Informational Minds." Here, we thank them for spending their time, meet some of their comments and indicate developments which their comments encourage.