Damasio Consciousness Model

According to Damasio, a thing achieves self-awareness when its brain models its body, the outside world, and their interactions. At this point, the thing is self-aware, but only from moment to moment. It is not a very interesting creature. If its brain also remembers the past, then the thing is aware of itself as something which has a life history. Now, if this individual is here today, then aeons ago its species has learned to have innate regulations for survival, such as to fear danger and crave food. Armed with emotions such as these, this self-aware thing-with-life-history becomes motivated because it seeks joy, avoids pain, fears death. It becomes lively.

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Knowledge, Understanding and Consciousness

12 October 2009, St. Louis, MO, USA
Workshop on Machine Consciousness within the KIMAS'09 Conference

There is an increasing interest in investigating the possibility of equipping machines with consciousness mechanisms. The rationale behind it may be just a further attempt to mimic biological minds but can be also a search for better performing architectures for machines. Whatever the reason one of the main problem is the still evolving understanding of biological consciousness.

The scientific study of consciousness has already provided some plausible models of this elusive phenomena. In some cases the postulated models stress its evolutionary functional value. This has led to an increasing interest from engineering, represented in the emergent community of machine consciousness, in the implementation of this functionality in machines, so as to provide them with enhanced cognitive capabilities for improved performance. However, a deeper theoretical comprehensive theory is needed in order to properly transfer the biologically inspired architectures into robust, functional implementations. 

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