This books is a must for anyone interested in consciousness research and the latest ideas in the forthcoming technology of mind.

It is argued here that the phenomenon of consciousness is nothing more than a special way of a subjective internal appearance of information. To explain consciousness is to explain how this subjective internal appearance of information can arise in the brain. To create a conscious robot is to create subjective internal appearances of information inside the robot. Other features that are often attributed to the phenomenon of consciousness are related to the contents of consciousness and cognitive functions. The internal conscious (...) appearance of these is caused by the mechanism that gives rise to the internal appearances in the first place. A useful conscious robot must have a variety of cognitive abilities, but these abilities alone, no matter how advanced, will not make the robot conscious; the phenomenal internal appearances must be present as well. The Haikonen Cognitive Architecture (HCA) tries to facilitate both internal appearances and cognitive functions. The experimental robot XCR-1 is the first implementation experiment with the HCA. (shrink)

The development of conscious machines faces a number of difficult issues such as the apparent immateriality of mind, qualia and self-awareness. Also consciousness-related cognitive processes such as perception, imagination, motivation and inner speech are a technical challenge. It is foreseen that the development of machine consciousness would call for a system approach; the developer of conscious machines should consider complete systems that integrate the cognitive processes seamlessly and process information in a transparent way with representational and non-representational information-processing modes. An (...) overview of the main issues is given and some possible solutions are outlined. (shrink)

Pentti O. Haikonen, Int. J. Mach. Conscious., 06, 71 (2014). DOI: 10.1142/S1793843014400125.