THE AUTONOMOUS SYSTEMS LABORATORY

Cognitive system

Object model

Object

Figure 4: System perception implies the continuous update of the models that the
system is employing in the generation of behavior.

mation coming from the inside of the system. Here authors will typically talk about
two clasess of preception, propioception —the sensing of the body— and metapercep-
tion —the sensing of the mind— but both are, senso stricto, the same class of per-
ceptual processes. This unified perspective implies that for explicit perception to
happen in the inner environment, there must be a model where percepts are to be
integrated. These models obviously constitute the very core of self.

6 The Emergence of Self

As was mentioned before, maintaining system cohesion becomes a critical chal-
lenge in the evolutionary trajectory of a cognitive system. From this perspective,
the analysis proceeds in a similar way: if model-based behaviour gives adaptive
value to a system interacting with an object, it will give also value when the ob-
ject modelled is the system itself. This gives rise to metacognitition in the form of
metacontrol loops that will improve operation of the system overall.

Apart of the many efforts in the analysis of reflective mental processes in bio-
logical systems that we are not going to analise in detail here⁹, there are also many
research threads that are leading to systematically addressing the question of em-
bedding self-models in technical systems. Some of them are:

⁹See for example Gallagher and Shear (2000) for philosophical, cognitive science perpesctives and
Kircher and David (2003) for neuroscience and psychology ones.

ASLab.org / Principles for Consciousness / A-2007-011 v 1.0 Final

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