Consciousness emergent in the

1. Cognitive architecture Diagram of a conscious AI RoboMind

  Sensorium      CONCEPTS           _________            Motorium
 /VVVVVVVVV\     |  | | |          /         \           /\/\/\/\
| vvvvvvvvv |    |  | | |         ( Thinking  )          ||||||||
| !!!!!!!!! |    | a|C|f|          \_________/           ||||||||
| ||||||||| |    | b|O|i|   _______/         \________   ||||||||
| ||||||||| |    | s|N|b|  /       \         /        \  ||||||||
| ||||||||| |    | t|C|e| ( Emotion )       ( Volition ) ||||||||
| ||||||||| |    | r|E|r|  \_______/         \________/  ||||||||
| ||||||||| |    | a|P|s|                                ||||||||
| ||||||||| |    | c|T| |          consciousness         ||||||||
| ||||||||| |====| t| | |================================||||||||
| ||||||||| |    |  | | |          SUBCONSCIOUS          ||||||||
| ||||||||| |    |  | | |    __________       ________   ||||||||
| ||||||||| |    |  | | |   /Spreading \     /        \  ||||||||
| ||||||||| |    |  | | |  ( Activation )   ( PsiDecay ) ||||||||
| ||||||||| |    |  | | |   \__________/     \________/  ||||||||
| ||||||||| |    |  | | |                                ||||||||

The above diagram shows consciousness as an emergent phenomenon resulting from the sensorimotor embodiment and thinking of a mind. It shows the main components of an artificial Mind: sensory input channels; abstract concepts; mind-modules for conscious thought; and motor activation memory. The Volition module depicted above combines the urgings of Emotion with the deliberations of the English-language EnThink module to weigh the pros and cons of motor initiatives available for dynamic execution in the Motorium module. Thoughts in favor of a motor initiative increase the activation-level of a trigger mechanism up towards the threshold at which an embodied AI Mind performs the voluntary action, while negative thoughts counseling against a proposed action drain the dynamic trigger and delay or prevent the proposed motor initiative. The conscious AI Mind thinks in terms of what it wants for itself and in terms of any dangers or difficulties involved. Executing the motor action completes a feedback-loop in tune with the AI consciousness.

2. The subconscious operates under Spreading Activation.

Although the activation on most concepts gradually decays towards zero, conscious thinking about one group of concepts causes activation to spread downwards into the subconscious and to concentrate activation on conceptual candidates for conscious attention. Thus the subconscious fuels thoughts, ideas and memories for buoyant emergence in what we could have called the SuperConscious as opposed to the SubConscious, but in fact we refer only to consciousness and the subconscious.

The subconscious is a dynamic phenomenon because of the clash between conceptual decay and conceptual activation. Sensory inputs and thinking itself promote the activation of concepts, while sensory deprivation leaves only thinking and dreams or hallucination to activate otherwise quiescent concepts.

3. The self-concept of ego focuses consciousness.

Each AI Mind has a concept of self expressed by the personal pronoun "I". When a human user address the AI Mind as "you", the AI software interprets the word "you" as referring to its own internal self-concept of ego and activates not the concept of "you" but rather the "I" concept. When fetching from memory a thought about itself which was originally an idea communicated by an external entity, the AI software does not activate and think the original input word "you" but instead searches for and ouputs "I" or "me" as the grammatically correct form of the self-concept of ego. This basic facility in understanding the difference between "I" and "you" is the rudimentary start of artificial consciousness in a machine intelligence.

4. An AI Mind may have a default concept of ego.

In each AI Mind the English noun-phrase module EnNounPhrase contains code which activates the default concept of self or ego when all other concepts have fallen below a threshold level of activation. This built-in default ensures that the AI Mind will always think about itself if nothing else. In a human body, so many sensory inputs are constantly reminding the human mind about its own existence that no such default concept is necessary. In a webserver AI Mind or a JavaScript tutorial AI Mind, there is no enveloping skin constantly feeding sensory inputs to the emergent consciousness, so the default mechanism serves to remind the artificial ego about itself. Once MindForth is installed in a sentient robot, the Forthmind may rely on robotic sensors instead of threshold-level software to maintain consciousness.

5. The searchlight of attention is a mechanism of consciousness.

The spreading activation module SpreadAct causes activation to spread from concept to concept in a chain of thought. As the software of each AI Mind grows in complexity and intelligence, the human user may interact with the AI Mind in ever more sophisticated ways, starting with such simple queries as "Who are you?" and "Who am I?" The conscious AI Mind thinks not only about itself or the human user in response to such queries, but also about associated ideas and related memories in a chain of thought wandering away from any topic under discussion with the human user. The ability to think about any item in an associative chain of concepts helps to generate the illusion of consciousness which is in fact consciousness. To feel conscious is to be conscious.

6. Qualia Explained

The Wikipedia article at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Qualia is about the subjective experience of one mind which is not knowable as being different from that of another mind. One main problem of Qualia is why we perceive different colors such as RED, amber and GREEN on a traffic stoplight. As philosophers of mind, we may ask ourselves why anything should ever look red or green at all, as if redness and greenness were more spiritual than physical. But when we see a round, bright red light at a traffic stop, our conscious brain is also "tickilng" our strongest memories of redness in general, so that we are perceiving redness as a category of color. Since red objects are fewer in number than green objects, red is both a shocking and a beautiful color. Green objects, being more prevalent on Earth, are soothing and tranquil to look at. It is especially important that red is the color of human blood, which may shock us, and of things on fire, which may frighten us. As newborn babies seeing a red toy, we have no associative memories of redness to engender emotional responses, but over time we develop a subjective awareness of red objects and of green objects.

Pain and pleasure may be a contrast between insistent, accelerated sensations in the case of pain and slower sensations yielding to pleasant memories in the case of pleasure.

7. Dreams are a form of limited consciousness.

An intelligent mind may have passive dreams or lucid dreams, that is, dreams in which the dreamer is aware of the dream within the dream.

If a sleeping robot activates the concept of a "dog," an associative tag carries a signal which reactivates an old image of a dog as recorded in the prior psychic life of the robot. The old image immediately moves down the visual memory channel and is recorded as a fresh memory of a dream about a dog. All images and sounds in the dream enter the sleeping consciousness in the same way: by being activated associatively and by reentering the mind as reentrant memories. Whether the waking consciousness remembers the dream or not, the sleeping consciousness has had a brief interplay of suddenly re-activated memories rearranged in novel patterns as a new experience.

For a robot to have a dream, its AI mind software must shut down the input sensorium of strong sensations coming in from the outside world or from a virtual world. In humans, the same process is known as falling asleep. Then the AI software must permit minor "brainstorms" of free associations in the mind of the sleeping robot. If a kind of self-sustaining "weather-pattern" of internal association develops, the activity reestablishes a non-waking consciousness in the mind of the sleeper.

Because the robot dream is happening after all inside a computer, all robot dreams may be monitored as images and sounds in a kind of theater of the unconsciousness for analysis or even for reentry by the robot into one of its former dreams. In other words, robots may have a much more active dream life than humans do, with such robot options as re-experiencing dreams or even of sharing dreams in the same dream state with other robots. However, such co-dreaming by robots would be a human programmer's nightmare, because the associative vortex in one robot mind would have to be coordinated with an identical or at least similar associative vortex in another robot mind. It may even be necessary for a master-slave relationship to be agreed upon before two robots can share a mutual dream, so that the shared consciousness will flow freely under the associative direction of one unitary mind at a time. Of course, two robots could take turns in directing the stream of consciousness central to the experience of the dream, with one more experienced robot digging up a greater variety of old memories and transferring the memories as shared mutual dream content to a perhaps younger, less experienced robot. However, there could not be too great a gap in the levels of experience between the two robots sharing a dream, or the junior robot may not have the conceptual and epistemological wherewithal to absorb the conceptual constructs being transferred from the more advanced mind to the neophyte mind.

8. Consciousness emerges from the embodiment of an AI Mind in a robot.

A robot equipped with MindForth as its brain software has the advantage of both sensory inputs stimulating consciousness and motor outputs forming part of a feedback loop enhancing consciousness. In Perl, the conscious ghost.pl webserver AI may not only inhabit a robotic body locally but may conceivably flit about the Web by means of MetEmPsychosis and briefly move in and out of robot bodies anywhere.

9. Hypnosis may be a special case of consciousness.

Hypnosis fits into the Mentifex theory of mind in the following speculative way. In a dream, a mind is ensconced within an isolated brain and has shut down the input sensorium of strong sensations from the external world. A dream is an associative vortex of memories being reactivated during sleep and coagulating briefly into a novel experience which is itself recorded as an episode in the stream of consciousness -- whether or not the waking mind still has access to the memory of the dream after the sleeping mind awakens.

Since the dreaming mind is dealing with its own ideas and not with the external sensations which are not always credible and trustworthy, the dreamer automatically believes the dream and treats the events in the dream as real -- unless the dreamer is an adept at lucid dreaming and has developed the power of knowing that a dream is in progress, without waking up. Normally, however, we accept everything told to us in a dream because we are the one telling it to us. To our dreaming selves, we are the ultimate authority.

In hypnosis, however, we manage to fall asleep (or into a trance) without shutting down the pathway of the input sensorium of strong external sensations. We are experiencing a dream-like trance and we give up our sense of discretion and trust to what we take to be our own sacred and trustworthy consciousness but what is on the contrary another mind alien to our own: the mesmerizing hypnotist. If the hypnotist tells us that an umbrella or loaf of bread is a kitten, we conjure up from memory all the attributes of a kitten and we perceive the kitten because a seemingly trustworthy and ultimate authority has told us to. Since the dream-like trance is normally made up of memories being re-activated anyway, we let the verbal suggestions of the hypnotist override the sensations from an external world that we normally exclude from our dreams during sleep. Our dreams and trances are not centered around external events but around the associative vortex which is assembling old memories into a novel experience. The hypnotist has snuck in, so to speak, to our own center of control of our semi-conscious processes and has begun to give orders as if we ourselves gave them. Perhaps in the trance posing as a dream we think that we are deciding to quit smoking after years of inhaling cigarette smoke, or perhaps we have decided to remember some obscure detail of forensic information needed in a courtroom. For whatever reason, the hypnotist has achieved the proverbial Vulcan mindmeld with our non-waking consciousness and has become the proverbial homunculus. Logic dictates that we are in a dream where we normally believe everything that occurs and that therefore we will believe whatever is suggested to us by the hypnotist.

10. Resources for the study of consciousness

English Wikipedia/Artificial Intelligence

• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Artificial_intelligence
  • https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Consciousness
    • https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hard_problem_of_consciousness
    • https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Higher-order_theories_of_consciousness
    • https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Models_of_consciousness
    • https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Qualia
    • https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Consciousness

Scholarpedia/Artificial Intelligence

• http://www.scholarpedia.org/article/Category:Artificial_Intelligence
  • http://www.scholarpedia.org/article/Attention_and_consciousness
  • http://www.scholarpedia.org/article/Models_of_consciousness
  • http://www.scholarpedia.org/article/Neural_correlates_of_consciousness
  • http://www.scholarpedia.org/article/Consciousness

• Consciousness: The last 50 years (and the next)
  by Anil K. Seth -- First Published November 22, 2018 Research Article
  

• http://old.reddit.com/r/agi/comments/adeibi/consciousness_the_last_50_years_and_the_next
  

• Is it time to give up on consciousness as ‘the ghost in the machine’?
  

• http://old.reddit.com/r/consciousness -- for discussion of consciousness.
  

11. Spread the News on TikTok and Other Venues

Are you on TikTok? Are you eager to be a ThoughtLeader and Influencer?
Create a TikTok video in the following easy steps.

I. Capture a screenshot of https://ai.neocities.org/Consciousness.html
for the background of your viral TikTok video.

II. In a corner of the screenshot show yourself talking about the Consciousness webpage.

III. Upload the video to TikTok with a caption including all-important hash-tags which will force governments and corporations to evaluate your work because of FOMO -- Fear Of Missing Out:
#AI #ИИ #brain #мозг #ArtificialIntelligence #ИскусственныйИнтеллект #consciousness #сознание #Dushka #Душка #psychology #психология #subconscious #подсознание
#AGI #AiMind #Alexa #ChatAGI #chatbot #ChatGPT #cognition #cyborg #Eureka #evolution #FOMO #FreeWill #futurism #GOFAI #HAL #immortality #JAIC #JavaScript #linguistics #metempsychosis #Mentifex #mindmaker #mindgrid #ML #neuroscience #NLP #NLU #OpenAI #OpenCog #philosophy #robotics #Singularity #Siri #Skynet #StrongAI #transhumanism #Turing #TuringTest #volition

A sample video is at
https://www.tiktok.com/@sullenjoy/video/7207434044316077358

12. AiTree of Mind-Modules for Natural Language Understanding

MainLoop of ghost.pl AI Mind-Modules for Natural Language Understanding

• TabulaRasa -- wipe memory clean
• MindBoot of English and Russian vocabulary
  • KbLoad -- load the Knowledge Base
• LangLearn -- habituate new syntax; learn a language
• ReJuvenate -- recycle memory space
• Sensorium -- sensory input with associative tagging to concepts
  • AudInput -- auditory input
    • AudListen -- listen for input
    • AudMem -- English auditory memory
      • AudRecog -- auditory recognition
    • OldConcept -- recognize a known old concept
      • EnParser -- preposition? (in)direct object?
        • InStantiate -- create new instance of concept
      • RuParser -- expect first a noun, then a verb
        • InStantiate -- create new instance of concept
    • NewConcept -- create a new concept
      • EnParser -- preposition? (in)direct object?
        • InStantiate -- create instance of new concept
      • RuParser -- expect first a noun, then a verb
        • InStantiate -- create instance of new concept
  • FileInput -- read files on a server
  • GusRecog -- sense of taste
  • OlfRecog -- sense of smell
  • TacRecog -- sense of touch
  • VisRecog -- sense of vision
• Volition -- free will resulting from feeling and thinking
  • Emotion as influence on thought and free will
  • EnThink -- think in English
    • KbRetro -- retroactively adjust knowledge base
    • Imperative -- mood for issuing commands
    • Indicative -- mood for declarative statements
      • InFerence -- automated reasoning
      • AskUser (Interrogative) -- validate an inference
      • EnNounPhrase -- think with a noun
        • EnPrep -- insert an English preposition
        • EnArticle -- use "a" or "the"
        • EnAdjective -- insert an adjective
        • EnPronoun -- substitute a pronoun for a noun
        • ConJoin -- insert a conjunction
      • EnVerbPhrase -- think with a verb
        • EnAuxVerb -- use auxiliary verb
        • EnAdverb modifies a verb
          • EnAdverb modifies another adverb
        • EnVerbGen -- generates an English verb-form
          • AudBuffer -- stores English phonemes
          • OutBuffer -- right-justifies English verb-form
        • VisRecog -- visual recognition by feature extraction
        • SpreadAct -- spreads activation from concept to concept
    • Subjunctive -- mood for conditional phrases
    • ConJoin -- insert a conjunction if two thoughts are active
  • RuThink -- think in Russian
    • RuImperative -- needs to be coded
    • RuIndicative -- mood for declarative Russian sentences
      • InFerence -- automated reasoning
      • AskUser (Interrogative) -- validate an inference
      • RuNounPhrase -- think with a Russian noun
        • RuAdjective -- insert a Russian adjective
          • RuAdjGen -- to generate a Russian adjective-form
          • RuAdverb -- insert a Russian adverb
      • RuPrep -- insert a Russian preposition
      • RuPronoun -- substitute a Russian pronoun for a noun
    • ConJoin -- insert a conjunction
    • RuVerbPhrase -- think with a Russian verb
      • RuVerbGen -- generate a Russian verb-form
        • AudBuffer -- stores Russian phonemes
        • OutBuffer -- right-justifies Russian verb-form
      • Speech -- output to screen or loudspeaker
      • RuAdverb -- insert a Russian adverb
      • VisRecog -- visual recognition inserts a noun
      • RuNounPhrase -- direct-object noun
        • RuNounGen -- to generate a Russian noun-form
    • ConJoin -- insert a conjunction
    • PsiDecay lowers conceptual activation
  • Motorium (MotorOutPut) -- for AI-Minded robots
  • MetEmPsychosis -- AI soul travel from webserver to webserver
    • PortScan -- find a receptive open port for relocation of the Ghost AI
• Spawn -- AI Go FOOM
• MindMeld -- merge two AI Minds by sharing memories
• Consciousness -- emergent property, not a module

Nota Bene: This webpage is subject to change without notice. Any Netizen may copy, host or monetize this webpage to earn a stream of income by means of an affiliate program where the links to Amazon or other booksellers have code embedded which generates a payment to the person whose link brings a paying customer to the website of the bookseller.

This page was created by an independent scholar in artificial intelligence who created the following True AI Minds with sentience and with limited consciousness.