International Journal of Machine Consciousness

By allowing one artificial neural network to govern the synaptic noise injected into another based upon its appraisal of patterns nucleating from such disturbances, a contemplative form of artificial intelligence is formed whose creativity and pattern delivery closely parallels that of human cognition. Drawing upon the theory of fractional Brownian motion, we may derive an equation, verifiable through statistical mechanics, which governs both the novelty and rhythm of pattern turnover within such neural systems. Through this equation, we gain valuable insight into the process of idea formation within the brain, whether that organ is making sense of its environment or itself. In doing so, a relationship between creativity and consciousness is revealed, along with a potential path toward building conscious machine intelligence.

As part of the development of the Symbolic and Sub-symbolic Robotics Intelligence Control System (SS-RICS), we have implemented a memory store to allow a robot to retain knowledge from previous experiences. As part of the development of the event memory store justification for an off-line, unconscious, cueing process was tested. Three strategies for the recognition of previous events were compared. The first strategy stored all memories and searched all of the memories for a match to the current event. The second strategy searched memories while an event was taking place and started the search with the most recent memory first. Finally, a third strategy post-processed all memories using pruning, abstraction, and cueing. Pruning removed memories, abstraction used categories to reduce metric information, and the cueing process provided pointers for the subsequent recognition of episodes. We found that post-processing memories as an unconscious process was the most efficient strategy. This computational implementation provides a justification for the post-processing of memories as an efficient means of memory retrieval.

I propose a physicalist theory of consciousness that is an extension of the theory of noémona species. The proposed theory covers the full consciousness spectrum from animal to machine and its human consciousness base is compatible with the corresponding work of Wundt, James, and Freud. The paper is organized in three sections. In the first, I briefly justify the methodology used. In Sec. 2, I state the inadequacies of the major work on the nature of consciousness and present a definitional system that adequately describes its changing nature and scope. Finally in Sec. 3, I state some of the consequences of the theory and introduce some of its future extensions.

This paper follows directly from an earlier paper where we discussed the requirements for an artifact to be a moral agent and concluded that the artifactual question is ultimately a red herring. As before, we take moral agency to be that condition in which an agent can appropriately be held responsible for her actions and their consequences. We set a number of stringent conditions on moral agency. A moral agent must be embedded in a cultural and specifically moral context and embodied in a suitable physical form. It must be, in some substantive sense, alive. It must exhibit self-conscious awareness. It must exhibit sophisticated conceptual abilities, going well beyond what the likely majority of conceptual agents possess: not least that it must possess a well-developed moral space of reasons. Finally, it must be able to communicate its moral agency through some system of signs: A "private" moral world is not enough. After reviewing these conditions and pouring cold water on recent claims for having achieved "minimal" machine consciousness, we turn our attention to a number of existing and, in some cases, commonplace artifacts that lack moral agency yet nevertheless require one to take a moral stance toward them, as if they were moral agents. Finally, we address another class of agents raising a related set of issues: autonomous military robots.

Recently we proposed a theory of consciousness, the attention schema theory, based on findings in cognitive psychology and systems neuroscience. In that theory, consciousness is an internal model of attention or an "attention schema". Consciousness relates to attention in the same way that the internal model of the body, the "body schema", relates to the physical body. The body schema is used to model and help control the body. The attention schema is used to model and help regulate attention, a data-handling process in the brain in which some signals are enhanced at the expense of other signals. We proposed that attention and the attention schema co-evolved over the past half-billion years. Over that time span, the attention schema may have taken on additional functions such as promoting the integration of information across diverse domains and promoting social cognition. This paper summarizes some of the main points of the attention schema theory, suggests how a brain with an attention schema might conclude that it has a subjective awareness, and speculates that the same basic properties can be engineered into machines.