Knowledge Needs and Information Extraction: Towards an Artificial Consciousness

Introduction

The title of this book is both subversive and ambitious. It is subversive because few academic publications deal with this subject. There has, of course, been work done in robotics on artificially reproducing a “human” movement. One can also find more cognitive works about the way of reasoning – i.e. storing and structuring information to induce the validity of a relation between two pieces of information. However, the term “artificial consciousness” is not applicable to any of these works. There is probably a spiritual connotation which philosophers have dodged by calling the discipline “reason” or “rationality”.

The book presents a theory of consciousness which is unique and sustainable in nature, based on physiological and cognitive-linguistic principles controlled by a number of socio-psycho-economic factors.

Chapter 1 recontextualizes this notion of consciousness with a certain current aspect.

In order to anchor this theory, which draws upon various disciplines, this book presents a number of different theories, all of which have been abundantly studied by scientists from both a theoretical and experimental standpoint. These issues are addressed by Chapters 4 (models of social organization), 5 (ego theories), 6 (theories of the motivational system in psychology), 7 (theories of the motivational system in neurosciences), 8 (language modeling) and 9 (computational modeling of motivation).

This book is a deliberate attempt to be eclectic – sometimes presenting fuzzy ...