Lucas, however, strives to do more. He seeks to design an artificial agent with all the essential properties of the human mind consciousness, declarative memory, a sense of self, reasoning skills, language, and social identity. His account is mechanistic, and yet, as the bio-inspired networks are linked to emergent mental properties, we come to understand that we can truly construct a conscious agent. We have a model for how to build one.
If youre interested in the emergent properties of mind, consciousness, cognition, self-awareness, social belongingness, or the possibility of constructing a robotic agent with such properties, then this is essential reading. It is conscious mind explained on a level that even a robot will understand it.
Gary A. Lucas taught and researched for more than fifteen years in academia and worked for over ten years as a human factors designer and systems engineer before focusing his attention on the design of conscious mind. He is currently a visiting scholar in psychology at Indiana University. Dr. Lucas lives near Bloomington, Indiana, with five very conscious cats.