Why Build a Robot With Artificial Consciousness? How to Begin? A Cross-Disciplinary Dialogue on the Design and Implementation of a Synthetic Model of Consciousness

Abstract

Creativity is intrinsic to Humanities and STEM disciplines. In the activities of artists and engineers, for example, an attempt is made to bring something new into the world through counterfactual thinking. However, creativity in these disciplines is distinguished by differences in motivations and constraints. For example, engineers typically direct their creativity toward building solutions to practical problems, whereas the outcomes of artistic creativity, which are largely useless to practical purposes, aspire to enrich the world aesthetically and conceptually. In this essay, an artist (DHS) and a roboticist (GS) engage in a cross-disciplinary conceptual analysis of the creative problem of artificial consciousness in a robot, expressing the counterfactual thinking necessitated by the problem, as well as disciplinary differences in motivations, constraints, and applications. We especially deal with the question of why one would build an artificial consciousness and we consider how an illusionist theory of consciousness alters prominent ethical debates on synthetic consciousness. We discuss theories of consciousness and their applicability to synthetic consciousness. We discuss practical approaches to implementing artificial consciousness in a robot and conclude by considering the role of creativity in the project of developing an artificial consciousness.

The Emergence of Self-Awareness: Insights from Robotics

“…As Forch and Hamker (2021, p. 6) argued, "it appears unlikely that an algorithm that is only constrained by a single computational goal could fully capture human behaviour and experience." Without the spontaneous interaction with the world, lifelong learning, and nonengineered motivation for performing self-relevant behaviours, integrating different dimensions of selfawareness, it is challenging to claim the potential of humanoid abilities underlying awareness of the self as the subject of experience (Hafner et al, 2020;Smith & Schillaci, 2021). Even though behavioural manifestations…”

“…Indeed, the corporeality underling early manifestations of self-consciousness involves the complex consolidation of multisensory inputs (e.g., proprioceptive, tactile, visceral) that constitute the foundations of the "transparent experiential background" of the origins of self-consciousness (Ciaunica et al, 2021, p. 4). It is this dialogue between artificial architectures and the prerequisites of self-awareness foregrounding the everlasting interaction between the body, brain, and environment, which could shape the direction of future research (Smith & Schillaci, 2021).…”

“…According to Anderson and Gallup (2015, p. 20), "merely simulating certain features of self-recognition through training/programming does not mean that the underlying mechanisms are the same, similar, or even remotely related." In humanoid robots, processes linked with self-awareness, notably mirror self-recognition, are predominately simulated rather than realized (Smith & Schillaci, 2021). In other words, currently, artificial agents have not demonstrated the unambiguous self-processing capacities of humans or great apes, and no direct comparison is possible as robotics research on mirror selfrecognition is at this point "quite far from the biological plausibility" (Lanillos & Cheng, 2020).…”

Multilayer networks as embodied consciousness interactions. A formal model approach

“…Finally, in [77] a synthetic model of conscious experience is built in the context of an "attention schema theory", including a layered set of cognitive models, the schema layer the one where phenomenological features are implemented. The attention schema refers to a conscious artefact having "a parallel set of information processes that can objectively monitor and report on how the whole system is put together" [78]. Our model can incorporate all these architectures avoiding, as well, their reductive stand.…”