Artificial Consciousness1

Artificial consciousness, sometimes labeled as machine consciousness, is the attempt to model and implement those aspects of human cognition which are identified with the often elusive and controversial phenomenon of consciousness (Aleksander 2008; Chella and Manzotti 2009). It does not necessarily try to reproduce human consciousness as such, insofar as human consciousness could be unique due to a complex series of cultural, social, and biological conditions. However, many authors have suggested one or more specific aspects and functions of consciousness that could, at least in principle, be replicated in a machine. At the beginning of the information era (in the ‟50s), there was no clear cut separation between intelligence and consciousness. Both were considered vaguely overlapping terms referring to what the mind was capable of. For instance, the famous Turing Test was formulated in such a way so to avoid any commitment about any distinction between a human-like intelligence machine and a humanlike conscious machine. As a result, the main counterargument to the Turing Test was raised by a philosopher of the mind (Searle 1980). There was no boundary between intelligence and consciousness. Similarly, most of the cybernetic theory explicitly dealt with the mind as a whole. It is not by chance that the first mention of the term artificial consciousness appears in those years in to a book of cybernetics by Tihamér Nemes, Kibernetikai gépek (Nemes 1962), later translated in English (Nemes 1969). In the following years, in the aftermath of the cybernetic decline, the idea of designing a conscious machine was seldom mentioned because the very notion of consciousness was considered highly suspicious. The reasons for this long lasting scientific banishment are articulated at length in many excellent books (Searle