Review of Consciousness and the Possibility of Conscious Robots

Abstract

This paper discusses the psychological, philosophical, and neurological definitions of con-sciousness 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, con-tinue 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. I.