Consciousness and robot sentience - Haikonen, Pentti O. (World Scientific, 2012)
Robots are becoming more human, but could they also become sentient and have human-like consciousness? What is consciousness, exactly? It is a fact that our thoughts and consciousness are based on the neural activity of the brain. It is also a fact that we do not perceive our brain activity as it really is - patterns of neural firings. Instead, we perceive our sensations and thoughts apparently as they are. What kind of condition would transform the neural activity into this kind of internal appearance? This is the basic problem of consciousness. The author proposes an explanation that also provides preconditions for true conscious cognition - the requirement of a direct perceptive system with inherent sub-symbolic and symbolic information processing. Associative neural information processing with distributed signal representations is introduced as a method that satisfies these requirements. Conscious robot cognition also calls for information integration and sensorimotor integration. This requirement is satisfied by the Haikonen Cognitive Architecture (HCA). This book demystifies both the enigmatic philosophical issues of consciousness and the practical engineering issues of conscious robots by presenting them in an easy-to-understand manner for the benefit of students, researchers, philosophers and engineers in the field
Ch. 1. Introduction. 1.1. Towards conscious robots. 1.2. The structure of this book -- ch. 2. The problem of consciousness. 2.1. Mind and consciousness. 2.2. The apparent immateriality of the mind. 2.3. Cartesian dualism. 2.4. Property dualism. 2.5. The identity theory. 2.6. The real problem of consciousness -- ch. 3. Consciousness and subjective experience. 3.1. Theories of consciousness. 3.2. The subjective experience. 3.3. The internal appearance of neural activity -- ch. 4. Perception and qualia. 4.1. Perception and recognition. 4.2. Qualia -- ch. 5. From perception to consciousness. 5.1. No percepts -- No consciousness. 5.2. Attention and consciousness. 5.3. The difference between conscious and non-conscious perception. 5.4. Information integration and consciousness. 5.5. What is consciousness? --
- ch. 6. Emotions and consciousness. 6.1. Emotions and feelings. 6.2. The qualia of emotions. 6.3. The System Reactions Theory of Emotions (SRTE). 6.4. Emotions and motivation. 6.5. Free will. 6.6. Decision making -- ch. 7. Inner speech and consciousness. 7.1. Natural language. 7.2. Consciousness and inner speech. 7.3. Conscious perception of inner speech -- ch. 8. Qualia and machine consciousness. 8.1. Human consciousness vs. machine consciousness. 8.2. Preconditions for machine qualia -- ch. 9. Testing consciousness. 9.1. Requirements for consciousness tests. 9.2. Tests for consciousness. 9.3. Tests for self-consciousness. 9.4. Requirements and tests for machine consciousness in literature -- ch. 10. Artificial conscious cognition. 10.1. Which model for artificial cognition? 10.2. Sub-symbolic vs. symbolic information processing. 10.3. What is a cognitive architecture? --
- ch. 11. Associative information processing. 11.1. What is associative information processing? 11.2. Basic associative processes. 11.3. The representation of information. 11.4. Distributed signal representations -- ch. 12. Neural realization of associative processing. 12.1. Spiking neurons or block signal neurons?. 12.2. Associative neurons and synapses. 12.3. Correlative learning. 12.4. The associative neuron as a logic element. 12.5. Associative neuron groups -- ch. 13. Designing a cognitive perception system. 13.1. Requirements for cognitive perception. 13.2. The perception/response feedback loop -- ch. 14. Examples of perception/response feedback loops. 14.1. The auditory perception/response feedback loop. 14.2. The visual perception/response feedback loop. 14.3. The touch perception/response feedback loop
Ch. 15. The transition to symbolic processing. 15.1. From distributed signals to symbols. 15.2. Requirements for a natural language. 15.3. Association of meaning -- ch. 16. Information integration with multiple modules. 16.1. Cooperation and interaction of multiple modules. 16.2. Sensorimotor integration. 16.3. Feedback control loops. 16.4. Hierarchical control loops -- ch. 17. Emotional significance of percepts. 17.1. The significance of percepts. 17.2. Emotional evaluation of percepts -- ch. 18. The outline of the Haikonen Cognitive Architecture (HCA). 18.1. General overview. 18.2. The block diagram of HCA. 18.3. Control, motivation and drivers. 18.4. Information integration, coalitions and consciousness -- ch. 19. Mind reading applications. 19.1. Mind reading possible? 19.2. The principle of the imaging of inner imagery. 19.3. The perception/response feedback loop in the imaging of inner imagery. 19.4. Inner speech and unvoiced speech. 19.5. Silent speech detection with the perception/response loop -- ch. 20. The comparison of some cognitive architectures. 20.1. Introduction. 20.2. Baars global workspace architecture. 20.3. Shanahan global workspace architecture. 20.4. Haikonen cognitive architecture. 20.5. Baars, Shanahan and Haikonen architectures compared -- ch. 21. Example: an experimental robot with the HCA. 21.1. Purpose and design principles. 21.2. Architecture. 21.3. The auditory module. 21.4. The visual module. 21.5. The emotional module. 21.6. The Gripper module. 21.7. The wheel drive module. 21.8. Self-talk. 21.9. Cross-associative information integration. 21.10. Consciousness in the XCR-1 -- ch. 22. Concluding notes. 22.1. Consciousness explained. 22.2. The conclusion