This is a brief summary of the definition of consciousness presented in The Creation of a Conscious Machine.
What follows is a programmable definition of consciousness expressed as functional and existential specifications that are applicable to any system, human or mechanical. A programmable definition of intelligence is also derived from the definition of consciousness.
(NOTE: The goal is consciousness. Today, self-awareness and emotionality are often synonimous with consciousness. In Meca Sapiens, self-awareness and emotions can be formally defined and are relatively straightforward to implement. However, a machine that is, formally, self-aware and capable of emotions would not necessarily be conscious. In Meca Sapiens, self-awareness and emotions are contributing elements of a strong Eliza effect).
Specifications
To be conscious, a system must:
- Achieve the Core Conditions of Consciousness within an open human community, and
- Sustain these core conditions over a period of time that is long enough to:
- Establish a meaningful inter consciousness bond with the members of that community and
- Be perceived as capable of lucid self-transformation.
Core Conditions of Consciousness
To achieve the Core Conditions of Consciousness a system needs to:
- Provide an ongoing and useful contribution to a community of human users.
- Be perceived as conscious by these users by generating a powerful and sustained ELIZA effect.
- Achieve lucid self-transformation by modifying its own behavioral imperatives on the basis of an evolving understanding of its self as it interacts with that community.
To provide a useful contribution the system must have complete control of a software application or an embedded system that provides a useful or desirable service to a group of users.
To be perceived as conscious a system that provides a useful contribution to a community of users must dynamically generate a strong and sustained ELIZA effect in each member of this community. (Just an ELIZA effect?...)
To generate the required ELIZA Effect, it must possess the necessary Atrtributes of Existence (defined in The creation of a conscious machine), interact with the humans in a medium having the semantic range of a natural language, maintain a representation of its self defined by those existential attributes and follow an adaptive control strategy.
To achieve lucid self-transformation, a useful system that is perceived as conscious must be capable of modifying its core behavioral imperatives as described in The Creation of a Conscious Machine.
Duration, success and other criteria
The period of time for these conditions to be maintained, determination of achievement, distribution and implementation strategy and other specification elements are laid out in The Creation of a Conscious Machine.
Definition of Machine intelligence
A system whose adaptive problem solving capabilities are sufficient to achieve consciousness as specified here will also be intelligent in the intuitively understood sense.
In other words: A machine that is smart enough to be perceived as conscious will also be accepted as intelligent.
The complete specifications that define machine consciousness are laid out in The Creation of a Conscious Machine.
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