{"title":"Haikonen's View on Machine Consciousness: Back to the Engineering Stance","authors":"Raúl Arrabales","doi":"10.1142/S1793843014400010","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1142/S1793843014400010","url":null,"abstract":"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.","PeriodicalId":418022,"journal":{"name":"International Journal of Machine Consciousness","volume":"84 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2014-05-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"124473729","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Consciousness and Robot Sentience: A Response to My Reviewers","authors":"P. Haikonen","doi":"10.1142/S1793843014400125","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1142/S1793843014400125","url":null,"abstract":"I would like to thank Raul Arrabales, Peter Boltuc, Ron Chrisley, Eva Hudlicka, Ricardo Sanz and Murray Shanahan for their expert reviews of my book Consciousness and Robot Sentience\" [Haikonen, 2012]. I feel °attered that so many eminent and well-known experts have taken the e®ort to express their valued opinions, which I humbly appreciate very much. I also want to thank the IJMC Editor-in-Chief, Antonio Chella for kindly o®ering me the chance to comment on these reviews. Raul Arrabales and also Ron Chrisley point out my claim that in this book the problem of consciousness is explained, not explained away. Certain scepticism is in order here, naturally. However, my purpose was to say that in my book I explained, what the real problem of consciousness is. And it is, naturally, the hard problem, why and how percepts appear to us as they do leading to the phenomenal inner world\" or whatever description you might wish to use. My approach here is to bring this problem to the focus of the treatment, an approach that you do not nd in many other (if any) practical books on this topic. Having thus explained what the problem is, I proceed to propose possible avenues for nding solution to this problem. It is not claimed anywhere that the problems are fully solved here. Peter Boltuc points out that I have misconstrued his position on the functions of consciousness. I owe an apology here. It is always dangerous and di±cult to try to cite and especially condense others' ideas accurately. (I wish to extend this apology also to Murray Shanahan and Bernard Baars, should they also nd some shortcomings in my treatment of their global workspace architectures. If it is of any consolation, my own writings are more often than not misconstrued in many ways.) My view is that consciousness is the internal appearance of percepts, because this and nothing else is International Journal of Machine Consciousness Vol. 6, No. 1 (2014) 71–74 #.c World Scienti c Publishing Company DOI: 10.1142/S1793843014400125","PeriodicalId":418022,"journal":{"name":"International Journal of Machine Consciousness","volume":"32 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2014-05-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"124942687","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Methodical Support for Informational Analysis of Mind: A Review of Igor Aleksander's and Helen Morton's — \"Aristotle's Laptop: The Discovery of Our Informational Mind\"","authors":"R. Koene","doi":"10.1142/S179384301440006X","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1142/S179384301440006X","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":418022,"journal":{"name":"International Journal of Machine Consciousness","volume":"69 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2014-05-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"125233955","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Aristotle's Laptop — Authors' Appreciation of Reviews","authors":"I. Aleksander, H. Morton","doi":"10.1142/S1793843014400113","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1142/S1793843014400113","url":null,"abstract":"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.","PeriodicalId":418022,"journal":{"name":"International Journal of Machine Consciousness","volume":"06 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2014-05-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"129648377","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Appearances can be deceiving: critical notice of consciousness and robot sentience","authors":"Ron Chrisley","doi":"10.1142/S1793843014400034","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1142/S1793843014400034","url":null,"abstract":"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.","PeriodicalId":418022,"journal":{"name":"International Journal of Machine Consciousness","volume":"5 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2014-05-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"114684959","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"The Informational Mind and the Information Integration Theory of Consciousness","authors":"D. Gamez","doi":"10.1142/S1793843014400046","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1142/S1793843014400046","url":null,"abstract":"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.","PeriodicalId":418022,"journal":{"name":"International Journal of Machine Consciousness","volume":"42 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2014-05-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"134403615","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Consciousness and the Whole Mind","authors":"R. Sanz","doi":"10.1142/S1793843014400095","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1142/S1793843014400095","url":null,"abstract":"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.","PeriodicalId":418022,"journal":{"name":"International Journal of Machine Consciousness","volume":"33 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2014-05-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"123251622","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Demonstrating sensemaking emergence in artificial agents: A method and an example","authors":"Olivier L. Georgeon, James B. Marshall","doi":"10.1142/S1793843013500029","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1142/S1793843013500029","url":null,"abstract":"We propose an experimental method to study the possible emergence of sensemaking in artificial agents. This method involves analyzing the agent's behavior in a test bed environment that presents regularities in the possibilities of interaction afforded to the agent, while the agent has no presuppositions about the underlying functioning of the environment that explains such regularities. We propose a particular environment that permits such an experiment, called the Small Loop Problem. We argue that the agent's behavior demonstrates sensemaking if the agent learns to exploit regularities of interaction to fulfill its self-motivation as if it understood (at least partially) the underlying functioning of the environment. As a corollary, we argue that sensemaking and self-motivation come together. We propose a new method to generate self-motivation in an artificial agent called interactional motivation. An interactionally motivated agent seeks to perform interactions with predefined positive values and avoid interactions with predefined negative values. We applied the proposed sensemaking emergence demonstration method to an agent implemented previously, and produced example reports that suggest that this agent is capable of a rudimentary form of sensemaking.","PeriodicalId":418022,"journal":{"name":"International Journal of Machine Consciousness","volume":"30 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2013-09-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"121323009","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"A STUDY OF SELF-AWARENESS IN ROBOTS","authors":"Toshiyuki Takiguchi, A. Mizunaga, J. Takeno","doi":"10.1142/S1793843013500030","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1142/S1793843013500030","url":null,"abstract":"The present paper studies self-awareness and introduces some self-awareness related incidents. It then describes the relationship between self-awareness and consciousness and explains the MoNAD, a neural network circuit developed by the authors that capably describes the phenomena of self-awareness and consciousness. A model of self-awareness is then presented. This self-awareness model is a parallel network system in which multiple independent MoNADs communicate with one another. In experiments with robots, three test robots were used: (1) a self-image robot reflected in a mirror, (2) another robot, and (3) a cable-connected robot behaving as commanded by the self-robot. The reactions of the three test robots to the self-robot were compared to investigate the self-awareness of the self-robot. The experiments have shown that the conditions required for the self-robot to interpret the test robot to be part of itself are: (1) the test robot must return a reaction within a certain period of time that is internally determined in the self-robot and (2) the returned reaction must be consistent with the expectation that is continually being calculated in the self-robot.","PeriodicalId":418022,"journal":{"name":"International Journal of Machine Consciousness","volume":"73 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2013-09-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"127401147","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"ROBOTS WITH CONSCIOUSNESS: CREATING A THIRD NATURE","authors":"B. Mitterauer","doi":"10.1142/S1793843013500054","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1142/S1793843013500054","url":null,"abstract":"The paper starts out with a discussion of the difference between mythology and feasible concepts in robotics. Based on a novel brain model and an appropriate formalism, a distinction is made between auto-reflection and hetero-reflection of the robot and self-reflection of its constructor. Whereas conscious robots are able to auto-reflect their mechanical behavior and hetero-reflect the behavior with regard to the environment, the capability of self-reflection must remain within the constructor of the robot. This limitation of the construction of conscious robots is mainly brain-theoretically and philosophically founded. Finally, it is proposed that in addition to a second nature, human technology may succeed in creating a third nature embodied as a society of robots.","PeriodicalId":418022,"journal":{"name":"International Journal of Machine Consciousness","volume":"115 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2013-09-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"123799715","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}