Consciousness as a Trigger to Adaptation

Abstract

Consciousness refers to mental states of a cognitive agent that make it aware of elements of its environment and its own state. Phenomena of consciousness have been studied in Philosophy, Psychology and Cognitive Science. With the advent of Artificial Intelligence (AI), the study of consciousness has broadened to include questions such as “When is an AI system conscious?”, “What role does consciousness play in the cognitive architecture of an AI system?”. This paper proposes a cognitive architecture that attempts to answer such questions and is an extension of proposals for practical reasoning, founded on the notion of epistemic goals, goals where the desired state-of-affairs is knowledge of something in the environment or within the agent itself. The proposal is illustrated with an example involving an autonomous vehicle.