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Shanahan's work admirably and convincingly supports Baars' global workspace by means of plausible and updated neural models. Yet little of his work is related with the issue of consciousness as phenomenal experience. He focuses his effort mostly on the behavioral correlates of consciousness like autonomy, flexibility, and information integration. Moreover, although the importance of embodiment and situated cognition is emphasized, most of the conceptual tools suggested (dynamic systems, complex networks, global workspace) require the external world only during their development. Leaving aside the issue of phenomenal experience, the book fleshes out a convincing and thought-provoking model for many aspects of conscious behaviour.

Thinking and being conscious are two fundamental aspects of the subject. Although both are challenging, often conscious experience has been considered more elusive (Chalmers 1996). However, in recent years, several researchers addressed the hypothesis of designing and implementing models for artificial conscious-ness—on one hand there is hope of being able to design a model for consciousness, on the other hand the actual implementations of such models could be helpful for understanding consciousness. The traditional field of Artificial Intelligence is now flanked by the seminal field of artificial or machine consciousness. In this chapter I will analyse the current state of the art of models of consciousness and then I will outline an externalist theory of the conscious mind that is compatible with the design and implementation of an artificial conscious being. As I argue in the following, this task can be profitably approached once we abandon the dualist framework of traditional Cartesian substance metaphysics and adopt a process-metaphysical stance. Thus, I sketch an alternative externalist process-based ontological framework. From within this framework, I venture to suggest a series of constraints for a conscious oriented architecture.

Machine consciousness is not only a technological challenge, but a new way to approach scientific and theoretical issues which have not yet received a satisfactory solution from AI and robotics. We outline the foundations and the objectives of machine consciousness from the standpoint of building a conscious robot.

Recently, there has been considerable interest and effort to the possibility to design and implement conscious robots, i.e., the chance that robots may have subjective experiences. Typical approaches as the global workspace, information integration, enaction, cognitive mechanisms, embodiment, i.e., the Good Old-Fashioned Artificial Consciousness, henceforth, GOFAC, share the same conceptual framework. In this paper, we discuss GOFAC's basic tenets and their implication for AI and Robotics. In particular, we point out the intermediate level fallacy as the central issue affecting GOFAC. Finally, we outline a possible alternative conceptual framework toward robot consciousness.</p>

Consciousness is not only a philosophical but also a technological issue, since a conscious agent has evolutionary advantages. Thus, to replicate a biological level of intelligence in a machine, concepts of machine consciousness have to be considered. The widespread internalistic assumption that humans do not experience the world as it is, but through an internal ‘3D virtual reality model’, hinders this construction. To overcome this obstacle for machine consciousness a new theoretical approach to consciousness is sketched between internalism and externalism to address the gap between experience and physical world. The ‘internal interpreter concept’ is replaced by a ‘key-lock approach’. Here, consciousness is not an image of the external world but the world itself. A possible technological design for a conscious machine is drafted taking advantage of an architecture exploiting selfdevelopment of new goals, intrinsic motivation, and situated cognition. The proposed cognitive architecture does not pretend to be conclusive or experimentally satisfying but rather forms the theoretical the first step to a full architecture model on which the authors currently work on, which will enable conscious agents e.g. for robotics or software applications.

Traditional approaches model consciousness as the outcome either of internal computational processes or of cognitive structures. We advance an alternative hypothesis – consciousness is the hallmark of a fundamental way to organise causal interactions between an agent and its environment. Thus consciousness is not a special property or an addition to the cognitive processes, but rather the way in which the causal structure of the body of the agent is causally entangled with a world of physical causes. The advantage of this hypothesis is that it suggests how to exploit causal coupling to envisage tentative guidelines for designing conscious artificial agents. In this paper, we outline the key characteristics of these causal building blocks and then a set of standard technologies that may take advantage of such an approach. Consciousness is modelled as a kind of cognitive middle ground and experience is not an internal by-product of cognitive processes but the external world that is carved out by means of causal interaction. Thus, consciousness is not the penthouse on top of a 50 stores cognitive skyscraper, but the way in which the steel girders snap together from bottom to top.

Artificial consciousness is still far from being an established discipline. We will try to outline some theoretical assumption that could help in dealing with phenomenal consciousness. What are the technological and theoretical obstacles that face the enthusiast scholars of artificial consciousness? After presenting an outline of the state of artificial consciousness, we will focus on the relevance of phenomenal consciousness. Artificial consciousness needs to tackle the issue of phenomenal consciousness in a physical world. Up to now, the only models that give some hope of succeeding are the various kinds of externalism.

To approach the creation of artificial conscious systems systematically and to obtain certainty about the presence of phenomenal qualities (qualia) in these systems, we must first decipher the fundamental mechanism behind conscious processes. In achieving this goal, the conventional physicalist position exhibits obvious shortcomings in that it provides neither a plausible mechanism for the generation of qualia nor tangible demarcation criteria for conscious systems. Therefore, to remedy the deficiencies of the standard physicalist approach, a new theory for the understanding of consciousness has been formulated. The aim of the paper is to present the cornerstones of this theory, to outline the conditions for conscious systems derived from the theory, and to address the implications of these conditions for the creation of robots that transcend the threshold of phenomenal awareness. In short, the theory is based on the proposition that the universe is permeated by a ubiquitous field of consciousness that can be equated with the zero-point field (ZPF) of quantum electrodynamics (QED). The ZPF, which is characterized by a spectrum of field modes, plays a crucial role in the edifice of modern physics. QED-based model calculations on cortical dynamics and empirical findings on the neural correlates of consciousness suggest that a physical system can only generate conscious states if it is capable of establishing resonant coupling to the ZPF, resulting in the amplification of selected field modes and the activation of the phenomenal qualities that are assumed to be associated with these modes. Thus, scientifically sound considerations support the conclusion that the crucial condition for generating conscious states lies in a system's capacity to tap into the phenomenal color palette inherent in the ZPF.