A Causal Foundation for Consciousness in Biological and Artificial Agents

Traditional approaches model consciousness as the outcome either of internal computational processes or of cognitive structures. We advance an alternative hypothesis – consciousness is the hallmark of a fundamental way to organise causal interactions between an agent and its environment. Thus consciousness is not a special property or an addition to the cognitive processes, but rather the way in which the causal structure of the body of the agent is causally entangled with a world of physical causes. The advantage of this hypothesis is that it suggests how to exploit causal coupling to envisage tentative guidelines for designing conscious artificial agents. In this paper, we outline the key characteristics of these causal building blocks and then a set of standard technologies that may take advantage of such an approach. Consciousness is modelled as a kind of cognitive middle ground and experience is not an internal by-product of cognitive processes but the external world that is carved out by means of causal interaction. Thus, consciousness is not the penthouse on top of a 50 stores cognitive skyscraper, but the way in which the steel girders snap together from bottom to top.