"Conscious" software: a computational view of mind

  • Authors:
  • Stan Franklin

  • Affiliations:
  • Univ. of Memphis, Memphis, TN

  • Venue:
  • Soft computing agents
  • Year:
  • 2002

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Abstract

Here we describe a software agent that implements the global workspace theory of consciousness. A clerical agent that corresponds with humans in natural language via email, CMattie composes and sends weekly seminar announcements to a mailing list she maintains. She's designed under a two tiered architecture with high-level concepts, behaviors, associations, etc., undergirded with low-level codelets that do most of the actual work. A wide variety of computational mechanisms, many taken form what is now called softcomputing, flesh out the architecture. As a computational model, CMattie provides ready answers, that, is testable hypotheses, to very many questions about human cognition. Several such are noted. There's also a discussion of the extent to which such "conscious" software agents can be expected to be conscious.