THE AUTONOMOUS SYSTEMS LABORATORY

ing with value to the more posterior cortical systems devoted to perception.
The result was an enormous increase in discriminatory power resulting from
myryad integrations among the reentrant circuits comprising this dynamic
core.

7.3 Addressing Aleksander ’s five axioms

Being conscious (continuously updating and computing meaning from world-self-
models in a model-based cognitive control loop) has some implications that we can
analyse in the context of Aleksander ’s five axioms for consciousness Aleksander
and Dunmall (2003) regarding a system A in a world S:

Axiom 1 — Depiction: “A has perceptual states that depict parts of S.” The model of S
that A has is continuously updated and contains a deep structure that makes
it a depiction of S.

Axiom 2 — Imagination: “A has internal imaginational states that recall parts of S or
fabricate S-like sensations. ” Models are used in predictive-causal exploitation
engines that may be used to predict, postdict or perform counterfactual anal-
yses of what-if situations.

Axiom 3 — Attention: “A is capable of selecting which parts of S to depict or what to
imagine. ” Effective use of scarce reasoning and metareasoning resources
would imply that the system has to select part of the whole specturm of
awareness flow for further analysis.

Axiom 4 — Planning: “A has means of control over imaginational state sequences to
plan actions. ” The stucture of the cognitive system based on principles 1-6
implements a metacontrol schema with full anticipatory capabilities for fu-
ture action generation.

Axiom 5 — Emotion: “A has additional affective states that evaluate planned actions
and determine the ensuing action.” Utility functions at metalevels are used to
decide between alternative control strategies.

8 Conclusions

This strategy of control based on self models can be applied recursively and have
metacontrol systems based on recursively applying the model-based machine struc-
ture. This is obviosly related to Sloman and Chrisley vision on virtual machines
and consciousness Sloman and Chrisley (2003). In our model, however, passing
from the first level to the next ones, something interesting happens. As Gell-Mann
suggests Gell-Mann (2001):

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

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