Consciousness and neural cognizers: a review of some recent approaches

This paper synthesises three diverse approaches to the study of consciousness in a description of an existing program of work in Artificial Neuroconsciousness. The three approaches are drawn from automata theory ([Aleksander, 1995][Aleksander, 1996]), psychology ([Karmiloff-Smith, 1992]; [Clark Karmiloff-Smith, 1993]) and philosophy ([Searle, 1992]).Previous work on bottom-level sensory-motor tasks from the program is described as a background to the current work on generating higher-level, abstract concepts which are an essential part of mental life. The entire program of work postulates automata theory as an appropriate framework for the study of cognition. It is demonstrated how both the bottom-level sensory-motor tasks and abstract knowledge representations can be tackled by a single neural state machine architecture. The resulting state space representations are then reconciled with both the psychological and philosophical theories, suggesting the appropriateness of taking an automata theory approach to consciousness.