An Artificial Consciousness Model and its relations with Philosophy of Mind

TL;DR

This paper presents a cognitive architecture for autonomous agents inspired by consciousness and philosophy of mind, integrating mechanisms like attention, memory, and global workspace to enhance adaptability and decision-making.

Contribution

It introduces a novel conscious model based on global workspace architecture, combining philosophical insights with practical mechanisms for autonomous agent behavior.

Findings

Agents benefit from the cognitive architecture in complex environments

The model improves decision-making and adaptability

Integration of attention, memory, and global workspace enhances performance

Abstract

This work seeks to study the beneficial properties that an autonomous agent can obtain by implementing a cognitive architecture similar to the one of conscious beings. Along this document, a conscious model of autonomous agent based in a global workspace architecture is presented. We describe how this agent is viewed from different perspectives of philosophy of mind, being inspired by their ideas. The goal of this model is to create autonomous agents able to navigate within an environment composed of multiple independent magnitudes, adapting to its surroundings in order to find the best possible position in base of its inner preferences. The purpose of the model is to test the effectiveness of many cognitive mechanisms that are incorporated, such as an attention mechanism for magnitude selection, pos-session of inner feelings and preferences, usage of a memory system to storage beliefs and past experiences, and incorporating a global workspace which controls and integrates information processed by all the subsystem of the model. We show in a large experiment set how an autonomous agent can benefit from having a cognitive architecture such as the one described.