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158 New Architecture of Robot Consciousness and the Robot Mind
reached. At this time, the phenomena have acquired scientific
grounds. By using this philosophical method called phenomenology
as advocated by Husserl, one can thus establish scientific grounds for
as yet unproved phenomena by following scientific processes. This
method, also known as scientific positivism, is actually a representa-
tive method used by researchers in the study of unknown worlds.
Consciousness and the mind are subjects of study for which no
scientific grounds have been established until now, and that is why
the phenomenological method is actively being used to study them.
9.1.3 Definition of Consciousness
The author selected consciousness as the theme of his study,
believing that the mind is the embodiment of consciousness. The
author further defines consciousness as a function to perform
cognition and behavior consistently, the details of which will be
explained later.
What does it mean to become aware?
As a result of phenomenological observation, the author believes
that to become aware means to realize that one is doing something.
To feel is a phenomenon that occurs when one becomes aware.
The author believes that to feel and to become aware are different
because to say that one becomes aware of feeling is understandable,
whereas to say that one feels becoming aware is a somewhat
uncomfortable usage of language. This suggests that in the human
brain, the concept of feeling is at a lower level than that of becoming
aware, and the two are independent. Thinking in this way, it seems
that to become aware is synonymous with to be conscious.
What, then, is consciousness?
The author uses Husserl’s 10 features of the functions of human
consciousness consciousness (Husserl, The Essential Husserl: Basic
Writings in Transcendental Phenomenology), for which scientific
grounds have been established by Husserl himself using the phe-
nomenology he proposed. The 10 features have been demonstrated
by Prof. Tadashi Kitamura at the Kyushu Institute of Technology
(Kitamura, 2000; Kitamura et al., 2000).
9.1.4 Features of Consciousness
The 10 features of consciousness are described as follows:
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Introduction 159
(1) First-person property: First-person property is the sense
that one is performing all things, i.e., a belief in the existence
of the self or mind–body monism.
(2) Orientation: Orientation means that consciousness is always
directed toward something.
(3) Relationship between action and result; duality of self-
consciousness: Relationship between action and result
refers to the chaining of an action and its result. Humans
always feel a relationship that a certain action has a specific
result. The duality of self-consciousness means, in other
words, that one is aware of oneself.
(4) Expectation: Expectation indicates that humans are always
predicting the immediate future.
(5) Function of determination and conviction: The function of
determination and conviction is identical with the belief in
the existence of things.
(6) Embodiment: Embodiment is the feature that the body is
part of the self. All of us are conscious that our body is part
of our self. The importance of embodiment in consciousness
is addressed in detail in the Phenomenology of Perception,
by Maurice Merleau-Ponty (1908–1961) (Merleau-Ponty,
1945).
(7) Consciousness of others: Consciousness of others is the
feature that enables us to discriminate our self from others.
(8) Emotional thought: Emotional thought is the feature that
reason is related to emotion and feelings.
(9) Chaos: Chaos means that consciousness is ceaselessly out of
balance.
(10) Emotion: Emotion refers to qualia of consciousness. The
human senses of taste, hearing, smell, color, pain, etc., are
deeply related to qualia.
A consciousness system, when proposed, should be tested using
these 10 features proposed by Husserl. How far the proposed system
can describe these features is an important index in the evaluation
of the proposed system.
The consciousness system proposed by the author can describe
all of these 10 features. Only one item, No. 10, emotion, has not been
achieved on the robot constructed by the author.
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160 New Architecture of Robot Consciousness and the Robot Mind
Figure 9.2. Imitation of Facial Expressions by Infant (images created by
the author).
9.1.5 Important Research Examples Related to
Consciousness
Let me first introduce an example shown in the research of imitation
behavior by infants as reported by Meltzoff and Moore (1977). They
discovered that a four-week-old infant imitated facial expressions
presented in front of the infant, such as sticking out the tongue,
opening the mouth, and pursing the lips. According to them, infants
are capable of imitation as soon as they are born. An imitation
scheme is already wired in the neurons of the brain when a baby
is born, i.e., imitation is an innate ability (Fig. 9.2).
There is a case study in imitation behavior (Lhermitte et al.,
1986) which was observed on a patient with partial damage to
the frontal lobe (Fig. 9.3). The patient in question was unable to
suppress imitating the behavior of the person sitting in front of him.
When the person in front of the patient reached out for a pair of
eyeglasses and put them on, the patient immediately behaved in the
same way. This case underpins the hypothesis that imitation is one
of the fundamental behaviors of humans.
Mimesis theory is worthy of mentioning here as another
discussion of imitation. According to the theory, imitation was an
important means to bring people together in an age when humans
had not yet developed languages (Donald, 1991). This hypothesis
suggests that imitation was an important function of humans in the
history of human evolution.
There is another important research result. It is the great
discovery of mirror neurons (Gallese et al., 1996). by Prof. Giacomo
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Proposed Concept Model of Consciousness 161
Figure 9.3. Examples of imitation behavior (from Lhermitte et al. (1986)).
Rizzolatti, a neuroscientist at the University of Parma (Arbib, 2002;
Rizzolatti and Sinigaglia, 2006). The discovery of mirror neurons
showed the existence of common neurons related to cognition and
behavior in the brains of monkeys and humans.
These numerous findings show that the mechanism of imitation
is critically important for human consciousness. This leads to the
fact that when one claims that the consciousness system they
propose is capable of simulating human consciousness, then the
proposed system must possess the function of imitation as a basic
feature.
9.2 Proposed Concept Model of Consciousness
The computation model of the consciousness module proposed by
the author is introduced in this chapter. The model is described
in a format allowing creation on a computer. The correlation with
Husserl’s 10 features is also explained. The reason why the self and
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162 New Architecture of Robot Consciousness and the Robot Mind
others can be discriminated and why imitation is possible is also
discussed.
9.2.1 Artificial Consciousness and Design of the Mind
Consciousness has been an important research theme in recent
years and is actively being studied in many disciplines, including
philosophy, psychology, brain science, cognitive psychology, and
robotics.
Consciousness is defined variously as the working of the mind
that recognizes and aspires, the state of mind that one knows what
one is doing now, and something that includes and underlies all
workings of our knowledge, feelings, and will. The mind is used in
a broader sense than consciousness and is defined as the whole of
knowledge, feelings, and will, whereas consciousness is generally
understood to be something underlying the mind.
As mentioned earlier, the study of mind started with the
philosophical discussions of Descartes, who launched mind–body
dualism. The study of the mind evolved with research on the
subconscious by Freud and other psychologists.
To facilitate scientific discussion of the subjective matter of
the mind, phenomenologists, including Husserl and Merleau-Ponty,
offered the necessary methodologies.
Brain scientists are engaged in researching the scheme of the
consciousness and the mind, with the brain as the central theme, by
directly stimulating the brain or by monitoring activities of the brain
with the help of PET, MRI, and other investigation systems. Despite
these numerous efforts, the location of consciousness and the mind
has not been identified.
The discovery of mirror neurons is considered very important
among all these achievements by scientists. The existence of
mirror neurons is important because their existence supports the
hypothesis that higher organisms learn by imitation.
The connectionists, including Prof. Daniel C. Dennett at Tufts
University, argue that consciousness can be created artificially
(Dennett, 1991) although concrete plans have not yet been shown.
Brooks and his colleagues at MIT have created COG, Kismet,
and other robots to study natural learning systems through the
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