Understanding consciousness (biological and artificial) as a society of self-schemas.

Abstract

This article argues that human cognition is more than the performance of functions such as memory, decision-making, and attention. The brain also builds schematic models of those cognitive functions and uses those models to monitor, predict, and partially control them. When you introspect, your understanding of who you are and what is happening inside of you is derived from those schematic, sometimes inaccurate, but generally useful models, rather than from the actual cognitive functions that are represented by those models. The proposal expands the previously proposed attention schema theory to a more general schema theory, in which the mind as we know it introspectively is a society of interacting self-schemas. The article focuses on five self-schemas including the attention schema (which is proposed to give us our intuitions about a conscious mind that takes possession of items in a vivid manner), a decision schema (which generates simplified, sometimes confabulated accounts of the decision-making process and gives us our intuitive understanding of agency and will), emotion schemas (which create complex interpretations of the physiological state of the body and provide us with our understanding of emotional experience), the body schema (which provides our understanding of who we are as physical beings), and personas (which give us our understanding of our emotional, social, and moral character, and act as a framework to guide our behavior). The article includes a discussion of how consciousness in a machine requires a similar suite of self-schemas used for similar functional purposes and may already be partially present.