“Conscious” Software: A Computational View of Mind
Stan Franklin · Studies in fuzziness and soft computing · 2001
Here we describe a software agent that implements the global workspace theory of consciousness. A clerical agent that corresponds with humans in natural language via email, CMattie composes and sends weekly seminar announcements to a mailing list she maintains. She’s designed under a two tiered architecture with high-level concepts, behaviors, associations, etc., undergirded with low-level codelets that do most of the actual work. A wide variety of computational mechanisms, many taken from what is now called softcomputing, flesh out the architecture. As a computational model, CMattie provides ready answers, that, is testable hypotheses, to very many questions about human cognition. Several such are noted. There’s also a discussion of the extent to which such “conscious” software agents can be expected to be conscious.