Naturalizing Consciousness Emergence for AI Implementation Purposes: A Guide to Multilayered Management Systems

The Debates On The Meaning Of Word 'Consciousness'

David Chalmers' Online database on consciousness is exhaustive and “monumental” (http://consc.net/online), indicating the great interest for this topic, expressed by philosophers, psychologists, neurologists, anthropologists or computer scientists. The complexity of this study has been identified as “the hard problem” (Chalmers, 1995). De Gardelle & Kouider (2009) have described the historical and conceptual evolution of the cognitive debates around the notion of consciousness. Well known homunculus paradox (Gregory, 1988) that is used as the central control system of mind justifying the existence of consciousness indicates a lack of understanding of cognitive process of a consciousness. Several models have been proposed to identify the consciousness: the Global Workspace Theory (Baars 1988), the Intermediate Level Theory (Prinz, 2005 following Jackendoff, 1987), the Information Integration Theory of Consciousness (Tononi, 2008, Edelman, 1989),the Multiple Drafts Model (Dennet, 1991), the Theory of Apparent Mental Causation (Wegner, 2002) and more recently,the Sensory-Motor Theory of Consciousness (O'Regan & Noë, 2001),Radical Plasticity thesis (Cleereman, 2008) or Bayesian Decision Theory (Lau, 2008). For the reason of the complexity of the understanding (Crick, 1995) and description of consciousness, some authors propose an indirect approach, being focused on the neural correlates of (human) consciousness (Crick & Koch 2003). The neurologist Antonio Damasio described the self-conscious feeling in his book “The feeling of what happens” (Damasio, 1999), it is directly intertwined with the emotional semantics that any embodied living system has. This is reflected in the recent rise of the interest of AI experts into emotional AI (Minsky, 2007).