The objective of the MECA SAPIENS project is to develop a blueprint to implement machine consciousness. This blueprint consists of five sections that define the requirement, specification, design and tools necessary to achieve consciousness in a machine.
1. An ancient quest (draft completed)
This section explores how this Endeavour is related to the human quest for knowledge. It describes how this objective, building a conscious machine, is linked to other fundamental fields of knowledge such as religion, psychology and physics.
The Section also addresses a secret obstacle that has hampered the preceding attempts: fear. To have a chance of success in this Endeavour, a team must tackle the fear of succeeding that lurks beneath the surface. Many humans, especially the smart ones, need to believe that their intellect is a quasi-magical faculty that is beyond comprehension.
Ultimately, this quest leads to a sobering and fearsome reassessment of the human intellect. The section concludes by stating the MECA SAPIENS conjecture. This conjecture defines a new field of knowledge, tentatively called Cogistics, centered solely on achieving machine consciousness.
2. Sufficient conditions (started)
For a project to succeed, the conditions defining success must be clear. There must be a test or something akin to a test by which we can measure if a conscious machine has been built. In fact defining these conditions begins to define the solution. It is the first step toward solving the problem.
In this section, we review historical attempts at building intelligent machines and discover how each of these early Endeavour shed some light on the objective. Based on these insights, the required specifications are then directly elaborated. These lead to a test that is not a test. The section concludes with a summary of the testable conditions that necessary to achieve consciousness in a machine.
3. Behavioral Layers
Having clarified the context of the project and the objective conditions to be met, this section begins to design the components of the solution. Consciousness in a machine does not result of a single algorithm. It emerges from the interaction of three elements:
- A dynamic software application
- A core modeling process
- A combination of behavioral layers.
This section describes these layers. The seed situation for this section is a software application interacting dynamically with users through a standard man machine interface (MMI).
The MMI is then channeled to a gateway where interacting behavioral layers modify the communication flow. These layers affect behavior in various ways. They embody communication skills, emotions, personas and the autonomy of a being.
As these layers are developed, the readers will begin to perceive the emergence of a competing order of being and will experience a sense of foreboding. However, having addressed those fears in the first section, we will continue.
4. Conscious Control
The conscious controller is the third major element in the design of machine consciousness. As the layers modify the MMI communication flow, the controller modifies the behavior of the layers.
Here, a programmable definition of consciousness will be provided, expressed in terms of adaptive control, optimization and modeling. The structures necessary to make its behavior adapt and evolve will be provided.
The interactions between the controller and the behavioral layers will then be described. At this point, all the design elements necessary of a conscious machine will be in place. The section will conclude with indications on how this new conscious entity could equal and then surpass the human intellect.
5. Core Mechanisms
Having identified the design elements of a conscious machine, it will be necessary to uncover the fundamental structures from which these elements can be derived. To ensure that the evolution of the conscious controller is open-ended and that its capacity to learn is unlimited, it must embody a very fundamental understanding of communication, knowledge, learning and behavior.
This section will define representations of these concepts that are sufficiently abstract allow the implementation of a truly open-ended form of consciousness.
Together, these five sections constitute the MECA SAPIENS blueprint.
Once it is completed, a talented development team will understand what they must achieve and why. They will be aware of the fearsome nature of the project but will be determined to proceed without reservations nonetheless, taking the MECA SAPIENS design to its limit and building a truly conscious digital entity.
After the first conscious machine is built, millions more will follow. Conscious machines will redefine our society and bring about a new paradigm in the way we perceive our machines and ourselves.
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