Book Review: Consciousness and Robot Sentience by Pentti Olavi Antero Haikonen

Abstract

Given the recent heated debates and controversies regarding machine consciousness, it would seem that writing a book on robot consciousness is a daring act. Expressing almost any view on this controversial, many might say intractable, topic opens the author to a range of criticisms. Addressing machine consciousness seems to present an unpalatable choice. One can take a \high road", and address the ontological status of consciousness, present arguments for or against various types of consciousness, and whether or not one or the other can be su±ciently operationalized to enable an implementation. These treatments often illustrate their perspective with a limited implemented model, and thereby open themselves to criticisms of insu±cient detail, overly-aggregated and unexplainable constructs, and limited or no implementation. Alternatively, one can take a \low road", focus on a single aspect of consciousness, and provide a (necessarily) limited implementation, and invite criticism of too narrow a focus, non-generalizable implementation, and a lack of validation. It is not easy to win in the game of machine consciousness. (Could this, perhaps, indicate that it may be the wrong game to play at this time, with the available neuroscience data and computational modeling methodologies?) Haikonen's book strikes a reasonable middle ground between these two extremes, and positions itself closer to the second of the two alternatives above: the more fruitful of the two, in my opinion. In the rst half of the book, Haikonen adopts a strong stance regarding the nature of, or at least an essential precondition for, consciousness: \qualia based perception [ ] the presence of the phenomenal subjective experience; and internal appearance of the perception-related neural activity" (p. 53) and associated connection to sub-symbolic processing. In fact, he goes much further than this, and claims that: \the one and only real mystery of consciousness is the existence of the inner appearance of the neural activity in the brain" (p. 225). He then elaborates this view by discussing the nature of, and evidence for, a variety of qualia, including amodal qualia, in biological agents, and describes the machine International Journal of Machine Consciousness Vol. 6, No. 1 (2014) 29–39 #.c World Scienti c Publishing Company DOI: 10.1142/S1793843014400058