A Process-Based Architecture for an Artificial Conscious Being

A conscious being is a system that experiences (feels) something. In order to build an artificial conscious being we need to give an account of what it is to experience or feel something. Any project that aims to design an artificial conscious being thus needs to be concerned with the notion of experience or feeling. As I argue in the following, for the purposes of robotics this task can be profitably approached if we leave behind the dualist framework of traditional Cartesian substance metaphysics and adopt a process-metaphysical stance. I begin by sketching the outline of a process-ontological scheme whose basic entities are called ‘onphenes’. From within this scheme I formulate a series of constraints on an architecture for consciousness. An architecture abiding by these constraints is capable of ontogenesis driven by onphenes. Since an onphene is a process in which the occurrence of an event creates the conditions for the occurrence of another event of the same kind, an onphene-based architecture allows for external events to provoke the repetition of other events of the same kind. In an artificial conscious being, this propensity to repeat events can be considered as a functional reconstruction of motivation. In sum, if we base the architecture for an artificial conscious being on onphenes, we receive a system that experiences (feels) and is capable of developing new motivations. In conclusion I present some experimental results in support of this claim.