Consciousness and Robot Sentience: A Response to My Reviewers

I would like to thank Raul Arrabales, Peter Boltuc, Ron Chrisley, Eva Hudlicka, Ricardo Sanz and Murray Shanahan for their expert reviews of my book \Consciousness and Robot Sentience" [Haikonen, 2012]. I feel °attered that so many eminent and well-known experts have taken the e®ort to express their valued opinions, which I humbly appreciate very much. I also want to thank the IJMC Editor-in-Chief, Antonio Chella for kindly o®ering me the chance to comment on these reviews. Raul Arrabales and also Ron Chrisley point out my claim that in this book the problem of consciousness is explained, not explained away. Certain scepticism is in order here, naturally. However, my purpose was to say that in my book I explained, what the real problem of consciousness is. And it is, naturally, the hard problem, why and how percepts appear to us as they do leading to the \phenomenal inner world" or whatever description you might wish to use. My approach here is to bring this problem to the focus of the treatment, an approach that you do not nd in many other (if any) practical books on this topic. Having thus explained what the problem is, I proceed to propose possible avenues for nding solution to this problem. It is not claimed anywhere that the problems are fully solved here. Peter Boltuc points out that I have misconstrued his position on the functions of consciousness. I owe an apology here. It is always dangerous and di±cult to try to cite and especially condense others' ideas accurately. (I wish to extend this apology also to Murray Shanahan and Bernard Baars, should they also nd some shortcomings in my treatment of their global workspace architectures. If it is of any consolation, my own writings are more often than not misconstrued in many ways.) My view is that consciousness is the internal appearance of percepts, because this and nothing else is International Journal of Machine Consciousness Vol. 6, No. 1 (2014) 71–74 #.c World Scienti c Publishing Company DOI: 10.1142/S1793843014400125