Publication Details

Abstract

This article offers some reflections on some features of human consciousness that are in need of an explanation. I wish to see if these features could be understood as solutions to design problems, solutions arrived at by evolution, but also, in the individual, as a result of a process of unconscious self-design. I consider this issue in the context of work in AI on the attempt to design intelligent robots – not “bed-ridden” expert systems, but systems that have to act in real time in the real world. How then does one partition the task of the robot so that it is apt to make reliable real time decisions? Any real, finite deliberator must partition the states of its world in such a way as to introduce the concept of possibility. This idea of partitioning the world into “possible” alternatives that remain “open” is very clearly the introduction of a concept of epistemic possibility. The article concludes with some reflections on the Frame Problem.