The Requirements and Possibilities of Creating Conscious Systems

This paper discusses the psychological, philosophical and neurological definitions of consciousness and the prospects for the development of a conscious machine in the foreseeable future. Various definitions of consciousness are introduced and discussed within the different fields mentioned. We conclude that a conscious machine may be within the realm of engineering possibilities if current technological developments, especially Moore’s Law, continue at their current pace. Given the complexity of cognition and consciousness a hybrid architecture appears to offer the best solution for the implementation of a complex system of systems which functionally approximates a human mind. Ideally, this architecture would include traditional symbolic representations as well as distributed representations which approximate the nonlinear dynamics seen in the human brain.