Pentti O. Haikonen – författare

THIS BOOK is the fully revised and updated second edition of "Consciousness and Robot Sentience". With lots of new material, it will provide new insights into artificial intelligence (AI) and machine consciousness, beyond materials published in the first edition. The organization of this book has been streamlined for better clarity and continuity of the lines of arguments.The perspective of AI has been added to this edition. It is shown that contemporary AI has a hidden problem, which prevents it from becoming a true intelligent agent. A self-evident solution to this problem is given in this book.This solution is surprisingly connected with the concepts of qualia, the mind-body problem and consciousness. These are the hard problems of consciousness that so far have been without viable solution. Unfortunately, the solution to the hidden problem of AI cannot be satisfactorily implemented, unless the phenomena of qualia and consciousness are first understood. In this book an explanation of consciousness is presented, one that rejects material and immaterial substances, dualism, panpsychism, emergence and metaphysics. What remains is obvious. This explanation excludes consciousness in digital computers, but allows the artificial creation of consciousness in one natural-like way, by associative non-computational neural networks.The proof of a theory calls for empirical verification. In this case, the proof could be in the form of a sentient robot. This book describes a step towards this in the form of the author's small experimental robot XCR-1. This robot has evolved through the years, and has now new cognitive abilities, which are described.

What are we humans, and how did we become the high technology species? What would be our legacy? What is the ultimate meaning of life? Many of these questions are still waiting for full and complete answers and explanations.For thousands of years humans have pondered the fundamental questions about origin, existence and reality, and also about mind, consciousness, communication and social issues. In this day and age when advancing technology is quickly transforming our societies and our ways of life, these questions are more important than ever, not only in the theoretical sense, but also in practice. We have to understand what has happened, and what is happening.For the first time in the history, technology has given us powerful means to investigate the phenomena behind the ultimate questions. However, technology is only a tool; the thinking human is still required for the understanding of the world.This book explores these curious topics, beginning from the origin of the Universe to the emergence of life; the evolution from cells to brains; the development of cognitive ability from perception and attention to reasoning and thinking; how we interact with other humans by means of love and emotion; to the creation of thinking machines by weird technology.THIS BOOK presents novel views on these questions and provides explanations and possible answers in an easy-to-read style.

Robots are becoming more human, but could they also become sentient and have human-like consciousness?What is consciousness, exactly?It is a fact that our thoughts and consciousness are based on the neural activity of the brain. It is also a fact that we do not perceive our brain activity as it really is — patterns of neural firings. Instead, we perceive our sensations and thoughts apparently as they are. What kind of condition would transform the neural activity into this kind of internal appearance? This is the basic problem of consciousness.The author proposes an explanation that also provides preconditions for true conscious cognition — the requirement of a direct perceptive system with inherent sub-symbolic and symbolic information processing. Associative neural information processing with distributed signal representations is introduced as a method that satisfies these requirements.Conscious robot cognition also calls for information integration and sensorimotor integration. This requirement is satisfied by the Haikonen Cognitive Architecture (HCA).This book demystifies both the enigmatic philosophical issues of consciousness and the practical engineering issues of conscious robots by presenting them in an easy-to-understand manner for the benefit of students, researchers, philosophers and engineers in the field.