Modeling intelligence: is awareness without representations possible?

Abstract

With the help of the foregoing text, I try to deal with the problem of the relationship between consciousness, awareness and self- awareness with the view of their modelling in artificial media. Consciousness is understood as the totality of all those properties that we lose, when we ‘lose consciousness’. Awareness is the property of some cognitive processes to be the subject to internal control. I show that mechanisms of memory and attention are generally all that is needed for such monitoring. However, according to a very common opinion, awareness is inextricably linked with self-awareness, and the philosophical foundations of this belief date back to Descartes and Kant. Based on the concept of representation as a necessarily simplified form of data exchanged by computing (including cognitive) processes, I show the irrelevance of this point of view