Robot Brains: Circuits and Systems for Conscious Machines

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A cognitive architecture for robot brains

10.1 THE REQUIREMENTS FOR COGNITIVE ARCHITECTURES

In artificial intelligence cognitive architectures are computer programs with an overall structure that tries to emulate and combine various cognitive functions in order to generate human-like cognition and general intelligence. An artificial cognitive system may try to emulate the human way of cognition, but it does not necessarily try to emulate the exact organization and structure of the human brain. These architectures may consist of separate program modules for the various cognitive functions; there may be individual modules for perception, memory, attention, reasoning, executive control and even consciousness. These architectures describe a certain organization and order of computation between these modules. They may be criticized for not introducing any real qualitative difference, as the executed computations are still those of the conventional computer. It can be argued that a computer program will not readily possess consciousness even if one of its program modules is labelled so.

Thus, the author proposes that a true cognitive architecture would not be a computer program. It would be an embodied perceptive system that would be characterized by the effects that it seeks to produce.

The foremost effect that a true cognitive architecture should produce would be the direct, lucid and enactive perception of the environment and the system itself. The system should perceive the world ...