Architectural requirements for consciousness

Abstract

This paper develops, in sections I-III, the virtual machine architecture approach to explaining certain features of consciousness first proposed in (Sloman and Chrisley 2003) and elaborated in (Chrisley and Sloman 2016), in which particular qualitative aspects of experiences (qualia) are proposed to be particular kinds of properties of components of virtual machine states of a cognitive architecture. Specifically, they are those properties of components of virtual machine states of an agent that make that agent prone to believe the kinds of things that are typically believed to be true of qualia (e.g., that they are ineffable, immediate, intrinsic, and private). Section IV aims to make it intelligible how the requirements identified in sections II and III could be realised in a grounded, sensorimotor, cognitive robotic architecture.