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  • Objectively verifying the generative mechanism of consciousness is extremely difficult because of its subjective nature. As long as theories of consciousness focus solely on its generative mechanism, developing a theory remains challenging. We believe that broadening the theoretical scope and enhancing theoretical unification are necessary to establish a theory of consciousness. This study proposes seven questions that theories of consciousness should address: phenomena, self, causation, state, function, contents, and universality. The questions were designed to examine the functional aspects of consciousness and its applicability to system design. Next, we will examine how our proposed Dual-Laws Model (DLM) can address these questions. Based on our theory, we anticipate two unique features of a conscious system: autonomy in constructing its own goals and cognitive decoupling from external stimuli. We contend that systems with these capabilities differ fundamentally from machines that merely follow human instructions. This makes a design theory that enables high moral behavior indispensable.

  • The idea that internal models of the world might be useful has generally been rejected by embodied AI for the same reasons that led to its rejection by behaviour based robotics. This paper re-examines the issue from historical, biological, and functional perspectives; the view that emerges indicates that internal models are essential for achieving cognition, that their use is widespread in biological systems, and that there are several good but neglected examples of their use within embodied AI. Consideration of the example of a hypothetical autonomous embodied agent that has to execute a complex mission in a dynamic, partially unknown, and hostile environment leads to the conclusion that the necessary cognitive architecture is likely to contain separate but interacting models of the body and of the world. This arrangement is shown to have intriguing parallels with new findings on the infrastructure of consciousness, leading to the speculation that the reintroduction of internal models into embodied AI may lead not only to improved machine cognition but also, in the long run, to machine consciousness.

Last update from database: 3/30/26, 1:00 AM (UTC)