The Development and Analysis of Conscious Machines

"The Development and Analysis of Conscious Machines" is the title of the PhD thesis written and developed by David Gamez at the Department of Computing and Electronic Systems, University of Essex.

This thesis can be viewed and downloaded from http://www.davidgamez.eu/mc-thesis/, a site which also contains data files, source code, and supporting materials. Resources you shouldn't miss in you are interested in Machine Consciousness and Synthetic Phenomenology.

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Raúl Arrabales Moreno, Machine Consciousness researcher at Carlos III University of Madrid

“CONSCIOUSNESS EVOLVES BESIDES GENETICS”

By Ana María Jaramillo V. (Translation of interview published by Blog Sistemas Inteligentes)

Inspired by the Strong Artificial Intelligence school, the same that captivated audiences in movies like ‘The Matrix’ or ‘2001 Space Odyssey’, this engineer by profession, multidisciplinary scientist by passion, believes the ultimate goal of Machine Consciousness research is to understand human nature. He pursues, as only a few do, the dream of creating self-conscious robots, as he asserts the best way to prove that something is understood is by recreating it.

Arrabales believes the real advancement of this field will come thanks to the synergy between mind research and technological disciplines. He knows he will live to see important qualitative changes and advocates the application of cognitive models from psychology or neurology to computational architectures.

This young scientist works in a controversial but fascinating field, where everyday research can be turned into fantasy, raising questions about free will and determinism in both humans and their creations.

AMJ: From what I understood reading you blog, you believe in the creation of artificial consciousness, don’t you?

RA: Yes, I believe so. However, it is not clear to me when and to what degree we will achieve this goal. Actually, one of the most important research lines I am currently working on is focused on the measure of the degree of artificial consciousness. There is no consensus about how to address this challenge. In fact, we don’t have a clear answer about the degree of consciousness of a coma patient. The definition of the term consciousness is a problem itself.

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