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Pentti Haikonen's architecture for conscious machines

Written by Trung Doan

Thursday, 10 December 2009

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Pentti Haikonen's architecture for conscious machines
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The Haikonen machine on ConsScale

ConsScale Level 6

If consciousness is an all-or-nothing thing and the threshold is not set too high at human adults' level, then the Haikonen machine is conscious. If consciousness is a continuum, then putting the Haikonen machine on Raul Arrabales' ConsScale would place it at about 6 o'clock on the ConsScale graph, scoring below the level of young human toddlers, and possibly on a par with some animals which we humans suspect to be minimally conscious.

ConsScale Graph

Having said that, Haikonen's theory does not clearly show a path for the concept of "I" to emerge. Sure, the machine can perceive the world, its body, its mental flow. If it sees one person after another standing in front of it, finger pointing at himself/herself, saying "I", it probably can deduce that each person is an "I". In front of a mirror, it probably can even recognise itself. But from all of this, how does the machine eventually deduce the "I" as itself, then know that the perceptions and emotions going on are its own qualia? Haikonen comes tantalizingly close, but he has not provided the final step to answer this question.

For the answer, we just have to wait until a steel-and-silicon Haikonen machine is built then goes through the motions of learning and cognitively growing up. Building the machine is an extremely difficult engineering and intellectual feat, one that requires the attitude like the quote at the top of Haikonen's website, "Only the impossible is difficult enough".

REFERENCES

• Pentti O Haikonen: The Cognitive Approach to Conscious Machines. Imprint Academic, UK 2003
• Pentti O Haikonen: Robot Brains; circuits and systems for conscious machines. Wiley and Sons, UK 2007
• Haikonen's website at http://personal.inet.fi/cool/pentti.haikonen/

(It is better to go straight to the Robot Brains book, as many concepts in the 2003 book are repeated here. If the sight of a few diagrams showing AND gates and diodes seems scary, just ignore them. I am lucky to have Haikonen's 1999 thesis book at the Helsinki University of Technology, and actually I find it to be the best, but it is not available online or can be purchased).

- Book Review: Robot Brains.

- Consciousness based cognitive scale: ConsScale.