Systems with 'subjective feelings' - the perspective from weightless automata

These are Christof Koch’s [1] closing remarks at the 2001 Swartz Foundation workshop on Machine Consciousness, Cold Spring Harbour Laboratories: “... we know of no fundamental law or principle operating in this universe that forbids the existence of subjective feelings in artefacts designed or evolved by humans.” This account is aimed at identifying a formal expression of the ‘subjective feelings in artefacts’ that Koch saw as being central to the definition of a conscious machine. It is useful to elaborate ‘artefacts’ as the set of systems that have a physically realizable character and an analytic description. The weightless character of the description dispels the notion that cognition and consciousness lurk within the weight values of a system.