In this collection of essays we hear from an international array of computer and brain scientists who are actively working from both the machine and human ends...

We are engineers, and our view of consciousness is shaped by an engineering ambition: we would like to build a conscious machine. We begin by acknowledging that we may be a little disadvantaged, in that consciousness studies do not form part of the engineering curriculum, and so we may be starting from a position of considerable ignorance as regards the study of consciousness itself. In practice, however, this may not set us back very far; almost a decade ago, Crick wrote: (...) 'Everyone has a rough idea of what is meant by consciousness. It is better to avoid a precise definition of consciousness because of the dangers of premature definition. Until the problem is understood much better, any attempt at a formal definition is likely to be either misleading or overly restrictive, or both'. This seems to be as true now as it was then, although the identification of different aspects of consciousness by Block has certainly brought a degree of clarification. On the other hand, there is little doubt that consciousness does seem to be something to do with the operation of a sophisticated control system, and we can claim more familiarity with control systems than can most philosophers, so perhaps we can make up some ground there. (shrink)

We are engineers, and our view of consciousness is shaped by an engineering ambition: we would like to build a conscious machine. We begin by acknowledging that we may be a little disadvantaged, in that consciousness studies do not form part of the engineering curriculum, and so we may be starting from a position of considerable ignorance as regards the study of consciousness itself. In practice, however, this may not set us back very far; almost a decade ago, Crick wrote: (...) 'Everyone has a rough idea of what is meant by consciousness. It is better to avoid a precise definition of consciousness because of the dangers of premature definition. Until the problem is understood much better, any attempt at a formal definition is likely to be either misleading or overly restrictive, or both'. This seems to be as true now as it was then, although the identification of different aspects of consciousness by Block has certainly brought a degree of clarification. On the other hand, there is little doubt that consciousness does seem to be something to do with the operation of a sophisticated control system, and we can claim more familiarity with control systems than can most philosophers, so perhaps we can make up some ground there. (shrink)

Over sixty years ago, Kenneth Craik noted that, if an organism (or an artificial agent) carried 'a small-scale model of external reality and of its own possible actions within its head', it could use the model to behave intelligently. This paper argues that the possible actions might best be represented by interactions between a model of reality and a model of the agent, and that, in such an arrangement, the internal model of the agent might be a transparent model of (...) the sort recently discussed by Metzinger, and so might offer a useful analogue of a conscious entity. The CRONOS project has built a robot functionally similar to a human that has been provided with an internal model of itself and of the world to be used in the way suggested by Craik; when the system is completed, it will be possible to study its operation from the perspective not only of artificial intelligence, but also of machine consciousness. (shrink)

The phenomenon of episodic memory has been studied for over 30 years, but it is only recently that its constructive nature has been shown to be closely linked to the processes underpinning imagination. This paper builds on recent work by the authors in developing architectures for a form of imagination suitable for use in artifacts, and considers how these architectures might be extended to provide a form of episodic memory.

One of the predominant iterations of the metaphor of entanglement in the nineteenth century is found in the closing paragraph of Charles Darwin’s On the Origin of Species. Darwin’s image of an “entangled bank, clothed with many plants of many kinds, with birds singing on the bushes, with various insects flitting about,” serves as a synecdoche for the patterns of biological interdependence and variation that animate the evolutionary process of natural selection.1 The “entangled bank” is both the scene and the (...) symbolic illustration of creaturely increase and multiplication. We cannot escape the influence of heredity in Darwin’s schema, just as surely as the imagined bank of vegetation will wreathe and entwine.. (shrink)