Project Proposal for a Synthetic Mind: Prefatory

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Is it possible to create a mind? That is, a machine that is actually aware (though not necessarily self-aware), as opposed to one that merely imitates the behavior of aware organisms? Part of the difficulty inherent in this question is arriving at some criteria for success. "Consciousness" is an elusive phenomenon in good part because we lack observable access to it, outside of our own minds -- that is, it seems to be inherently non-objective, which is often thought to be a disqualification for scientific study. Yet few people, including scientists, would be willing to doubt that it exists.

The following series of notes makes the claim that conscious awareness is indeed a real phenomenon, occurring in the same physical reality as other phenomena, and made up of the same "stuff" as the rest of the world. Moreover, since consciousness is a function of structure, not of materials, it should be possible to produce a system that manifested an artificial or synthetic consciousness by reproducing that structure in hardware and software. Though ultimate criteria for success will still be hard to come by, such a construction would be able to offer a testbed for a variety of investigative strategies by which such criteria might eventually be formulated. These notes, of course, are merely descriptive, and a suggestion of a starting point.