CONSCIOUSNESS, QUALIA AND ROBOT MINDS

Consciousness, Qualia and Robot Minds offers a clear, integrated treatment of the philosophical and technical foundations of the self, mind, consciousness, and qualia. Its novel logically and technically sound insights clarify and explain long-standing mysteries about consciousness, qualia, machine consciousness, inner speech, and related phenomena that other works have struggled to explain.

Covering topics such as the mind–body problem, the observer problem, neural coding, emotions, symbol grounding, associative processing, inner speech, and situational awareness, the book explains how mental phenomena can be analyzed, modelled, and implemented in machines. It then develops these concepts into concrete engineering approaches through the HCA associative architecture and its hardware proofs, demonstrating precursors of conscious perception in robotic systems.

This monograph will interest researchers, graduate students, engineers and cognitive scientists working on advanced robotics or AI, as well as philosophers of the mind delving into AI and machine consciousness.

Contents:

• Preface
• About the Author
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• The Self and the Mind
• The Mind–Body Problem
• The Observer Problem
• Qualia, the Evasive Essence of Perception
• The Brain and Neurons
• Sensing and Neural Codes
• The Material Explanation of Qualia
• Qualia Localized and Externalized
• The Qualia of Pain and Pleasure
• Emotions and Qualia
• Astrocytes and Emotions
• The Symbol Grounding Problem and Qualia
• Associative Information Processing
• Perception, Feedback and Imagination
• Memory in Computers and in the Mind
• Situational Awareness and Mental Models of the World
• Consciousness Explained
• Natural Languages
• Conscious Inner Speech
• Towards Conscious Machines
• Haikonen Cognitive Architecture: An Associative Architecture for Robot Brains
• Mind–Body Interactions and Self-Wiring in HCA
• Precursors of Conscious Perception in the XCR-1 Robot
• Concluding Notes
• References
• Index

Readership: For researchers, graduate students and engineers working on advanced robotics or AI; For philosophers of the mind delving into AI and machine consciousness.