Consciousness, Emotion, and Imagination
A Brain-Inspired Architecture for Cognitive
Robotics
Murray Shanahan
Abstract
This paper proposes a brain-inspired cognitive architecture that incorporates
approximations to the concepts of consciousness, emotion, and imagination.
To emulate the empirically established cognitive efficacy of conscious as
opposed to unconscious information processing in the mammalian brain, the
architecture adopts a model of information flow from global workspace theory.
Cognitive functions such as anticipation and planning are realised through
internal simulation of interaction with the environment. Action selection,
in both actual and internally simulated interaction with the environment,
is mediated by affect. An implementation of the architecture is described
which is based on weightless neurons and is used to control a simulated robot.