System perception implies the continuous update of the models that the system
is employing in the generation of behavior; but this continuous update is not just
keeping in mind an updated picture of the status of part of the environment —like
a photograph— but continuously restructuring and retuning the dynamical model
of the object used in the action generation process.
System awareness requires the additional steps of automatically predict and
evaluate. While many researchers claim for a —necessary— sensory-motor pro-
file of awareness and consciousness, action is not necessary for the definition of
awareness; but obviously when the models are used for action selection and built
by a process of sensory-motor interaction, action becomes critical for the awareness
architecture; but models can be built using other methods (see Section 2.4) and this
will be more manifest in artificial systems.
7.2 Defining consciousness
When the target of the awareness mechanism is the aware system itself, conscious-
ness happens:
Principle 7: System self-awareness/consciousness — A system is con-
scious if it is continuously generating meanings from continously updated
self-models in a model-based cognitive control architecture.
System self-awareness —consciousness— just implies that the continuous model
update include the updating of submodels about the system itself that are be-
ing evaluated. The models of the supersystem —system+object— are used in the
model-based generation of system behavior. So the process of behavior generation
is explicitly represented in the mind of the behaving agent as driven by a value
system. In this sense the interpretation of consciousness that we propose here
depart from higher-order theories of consciousness Rosenthal (ming); Kriegel and
Williford (2006) in the fact that self-awareness is not just higher order perception.
Meaning generation is lacking in this last one.
Another question of extreme relevance is the maximally deep integration of the
model and metamodel. As Kriegel Kriegel (2006) argues, higher-order monitoring
theory makes the monitoring state and the monitored state logically independent
with a mere contingent connection. We are more in the line of Kriegel same-order
monitoring theory that argues for a core non-contingent relation between the mon-
itoring state and the monitored state.
One big difference between being aware and being conscious cames from the ca-
pability of action attribution to the system itself thanks to the capability of making
a distinction between self and the rest of the world11. This implies that a conscious
11Obviously, even while we argued for awareness/consciousness as a purely input, perceptual
process, these associations to action processes links consciousness with action generation and even
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