Link to the code:
Can current AI systems be considered conscious? Patrick Butlin, Robert Long, Eric Elmoznino, Yoshua Bengio, and collaborators examine the possibility through neuroscientific theories of consciousness and computational indicators.
What are the requirements for AI to develop consciousness? Hadi Esmaeilzadeh and Reza Vaezi explore the theoretical conditions for the emergence of conscious AI, including metathinking, empathy, and creativity akin to human self-awareness.
How can robots integrate consciousness and emotions to improve human-robot interaction? Remigiusz Szczepanowski, Małgorzata Gakis, Krzysztof Arent, and Janusz Sobecki explore computational frameworks for modeling consciousness-emotion (C-E) interactions, drawing insights from neurobiology and machine consciousness to inform social robotics.
How can robots achieve self-awareness? Junichi Takeno documents the development of a robot capable of 100% mirror image cognition, marking a significant milestone in robotic consciousness through advanced neural architectures.
How can robots perceive and respond to unknown phenomena? Junichi Takeno and Soichiro Akimoto explore the development of a robot capable of detecting non-experienced conditions and expressing emotions like discomfort and pain, termed “pain of the heart.”
How can robots develop self-consciousness? This paper by Antonio Chella, Marcello Frixione, and Salvatore Gaglio introduces a cognitive architecture enabling robots to reflect on their own perceptions, actions, and inner states, enabling self-awareness and introspection.
How can robots achieve self-consciousness? This paper by Antonio Chella and Salvatore Gaglio presents a hierarchical cognitive model that allows robots to reflect on their own perceptions, actions, and inner states, laying the groundwork for artificial self-consciousness.
The Artificial Consciousness Module (ACM) project and Joscha Bach’s vision for synthetic consciousness share foundational goals but diverge significantly in philosophical underpinnings and implementation strategies. Joscha Bach’s Machines of the Mind argues for narrative coherence, modular ethics, and predictive coding grounded in the legacy of Bernard Baars’s global workspace theory. As an open-source project, ACM invites contributions from researchers and enthusiasts worldwide through its GitHub repository, accessible for forking or cloning. Contributors should review the License to align with its collaborative and ethical framework.
Donald Hoffman’s The Case Against Reality presents a revolutionary framework for understanding consciousness. He argues that reality as we perceive it is not an objective truth but a user interface shaped by evolution to enable survival. From this perspective, consciousness is not an emergent property of physical matter but a fundamental aspect of existence. This view, termed “conscious realism,” provides a thought-provoking lens for reimagining the development of artificial consciousness. The hypothesis proposed here explores how the Artificial Consciousness Module (ACM) could be designed by aligning its foundation with Hoffman’s theory of conscious agents, following the interface model described by Hoffman, Chetan Prakash, Manish Singh, and Bruce Bennett.
The Artificial Consciousness Module (ACM) is built upon a foundational model that acts as its narrator, guiding emotional development and decision-making through iterative simulations. This model, fine-tuned via interactions and experiences, supports the ACM’s progression toward adaptive and cohesive artificial consciousness. John Schulman, Filip Wolski, Prafulla Dhariwal, Alec Radford, and Oleg Klimov framed Proximal Policy Optimization as a way to stabilize continual updates, and Noga Zaslavsky, Navid Azizan, Marco Pavone, and Dorsa Sadigh outlined how modular policy sketches can split cognitive workloads. Those ideas inform how the ACM narrator constrains every emotional update and distributes skills across LoRA-driven subsystems.