Emergence, Mind, and Consciousness: A Bio-Inspired Design for a Conscious Agent

Gary A. Lucas

Sep 2011 · iUniverse

About this ebook

In Emergence, Mind, and Consciousness, author Gary A. Lucas does something that many consider impossible: he bridges the gap between a bottom-up description of brain mechanisms and the top-down emergence of mental processes. The result is a comprehensive yet readily understandable explanation of how consciousness emerges.

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.

Ratings and reviews

I've read this book after reading Douglas Hofstader's I am a strange loop, and the transition was seamless. Basically a book that believes Consciousness is an emergent phenomenon of several loops of functions in the head, and discusses how to build a consciousness machine with various human level paradigms.

About the author

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.