Review of Consciousness and the Possibility of Conscious Robots

This paper discusses the psychological, philosophical, and neurological definitions of consciousness and the prospects for the development of conscious machines or robots in the foreseeable future. Various definitions of consciousness are introduced and discussed within the different fields mentioned. A conscious machine or robot may be within the realm of engineering possibilities if current technological developments, especially Moore’s law, continue at their current pace. Given the complexity of cognition and consciousness a hybrid parallel architecture with significant input/output appears to offer the best solution for the implementation of a complex system of systems which functionally approximates a human mind. Ideally, this architecture would include traditional symbolic representations as well as distributed representations which approximate the nonlinear dynamics seen in the human brain.

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