Gary A. Lucas

Emergence, Mind, and Consciousness: a Bio-inspired Design for a Conscious Agent Gary A. Lucas

The link between emergent properties and changes in organization is what author Gary A. Lucas calls the organization effect. This concept has important implications for the design of cognitive systems. If changes in organization introduce new properties, then it follows that once we discover the structures that generate key properties in biological minds we can recreate those properties in another form.

Building on Antonio Damasio's description of consciousness as the feeling of what happens, Lucas relies on findings in neuroscience to explain why such feelings emerge in human minds and how similar feelings can be implemented in a robotic agent. He then reverse engineers the mechanisms of the human brain that give rise to intelligence, a sense of self, and a sense of social belongingness to show how those properties can also be implemented in a robotic mind. The result is an account of a conscious, reasoning, socially aware agent that provides novel perspectives on the mechanisms of our own mind.