Making robots conscious of their mentaI states
John McCarthy · 2000
Abstract In AI, consciousness of self consists in a program having certain kinds of facts about its own mental processes and state of mind. We discuss what consciousness of its own mental structures a robot will need in order to operate in the common-sense world and accomplish the tasks humans will give it. It’s quite a lot. Many features of human consciousness will be wanted, some will not, and some abilities not possessed by humans will be found feasible and useful. We give preliminary fragments of a logical language a robot can use to represent information about its own state of mind. A robot will often have to conclude that it cannot decide a question on the basis of the information in memory and therefore must seek information externally. Godel’s idea of relative consistency is used to formalize non-knowledge.