=Paper=
{{Paper
|id=Vol-2287/paper28
|storemode=property
|title=Can a Virtual Entity Support Real Consciousness, and How Might This Lead to Conscious Robots?
|pdfUrl=https://ceur-ws.org/Vol-2287/paper28.pdf
|volume=Vol-2287
|authors=Owen Holland
|dblpUrl=https://dblp.org/rec/conf/aaaiss/Holland19
}}
==Can a Virtual Entity Support Real Consciousness, and How Might This Lead to Conscious Robots?==
https://ceur-ws.org/Vol-2287/paper28.pdf
Can a Virtual Entity Support Real Consciousness, and
How Might This Lead to Conscious Robots?
Owen Holland
Sackler Centre for Consciousness Science
University of Sussex, Brighton BN1 9QJ, UK
O.E.Holland@sussex.ac.uk
Abstract. A key issue within the area of putatively conscious AI systems is that
of whether a wholly virtual system can ever be capable of supporting real con-
sciousness. This paper first considers the theoretical implications if such sys-
tems using digital technologies could in fact exist, and then explores the conse-
quent practical implications for the creation of virtual and real conscious sys-
tems. It is argued that the best strategy is probably to first create a virtual con-
sciousness with components analogous to a virtual embodiment, and then to
migrate the conscious core by degrees into a physical embodiment.
Keywords: Conscious robots, virtual entities, virtual worlds
1 Some Fundamental Thoughts
The key question is easy to ask: Could a virtual entity in a virtual world be conscious?
Many people find it easy to answer, too, with a Yes or a No, but this is usually an
expression of belief rather than the result of a reasoned review of facts and underlying
assumptions. For the moment, let us ignore the arguments for and against the two
positions, and instead explore some of the consequences if Yes is the correct answer.
To answer Yes, we would need to have a clear idea of what we meant by virtual.
As of now, the only way we have of creating virtual entities and virtual worlds is to
use digital substrates – computers in one form or another – and so we will restrict the
discussion accordingly. (For practical reasons we omit quantum computers.) In the
simplest case, the entities and the world will be represented in terms of the states of
many different kinds of physical computer components that have been arranged so
that they behave as if they have finite logical states that make synchronised transitions
determined only by the previous states and any current inputs. It is important to real-
ise that the phrase 'behave as if' conceals what is really happening at the electromag-
netic level. Electronics engineers say that digital is just overdriven analogue, and so
continuous change and a lack of strict simultaneity and synchronisation hold sway at
the micro and nano scales. This limits any definition of consciousness derived from
physical processes.
At the level with which we are concerned, both the virtual entity and its world are
also necessarily constructed from these logical states and notionally synchronous
2
transitions, and their boundaries and causal interactions are defined in the running
software, including the operating system, and not at any lower level. However, while
the logical state transitions are arranged to be deterministic, transitions at the higher
software component level may be made to be effectively probabilistic by specifying
probability distributions underpinned by random number generators. A software enti-
ty and the software world by which it can be affected, and which it can affect, do not
intrinsically have to be representations of anything else. What then separates the enti-
ty from its world so that we could say that the entity was conscious, but not its world?
This question is potentially complicated by the contention by some that consciousness
in nature is not limited to the physical boundary of an entity, but extends into the
world [1]. This idea will not be considered further here. However, one thing is certain:
if both conscious entity and world are instantiated in the same computer, it would be
nonsense to say that the computer is conscious. However, if the world in the computer
is derived from and linked to the real world, and if the conscious computer-based
entity can cause changes in the entity's world that are reflected in changes in the real
world, then it might seem reasonable to many to say that the computer is conscious in
exactly the same way as we say that a person is conscious, though this perhaps says
more about our imprecise language use concerning humans than anything else.
What are the requirements for certain aspects of running software to constitute an
entity that maintains its identity over time? (The concept of a software entity already
exists in software engineering, but we mean something rather different here.) In the
simplest case, if the memory locations used by the entity specified in the software are
static and known at compile time, then this is not a problem, as the boundaries of the
entity and the successive processes within it can then be completely known. However,
if the locations are dynamic, only known at runtime, and possibly dependent on
events, the physical locations used by the entity can vary with time, and so the entity
can only be defined at the level of the software structure and not at the hardware level.
In addition, there must exist some degree of separation of the entity from whatever
else there is in the software – the world, perhaps including other entities – while still
allowing each to affect the other in an interaction that must be constrained in certain
ways. Perhaps the best strategy is to define the scope of the transactions between them
in such a way as to reflect the intrinsic constraints of the physical transactions be-
tween our bodies and the world, and this involves assuming that the virtual entity is
contained within a structure corresponding to a virtual body. One convenient way of
achieving this is to use physics based software to model both the virtual entity's body
and its environment. A further advantage of this is that much of what we know about
our own consciousness is both shaped and expressed in terms of our physical body
and its sensory and physical interactions with the world, and having access to similar
representations may help us to appreciate any commonalities between our own con-
sciousness and the putative consciousness of the artificial entity.
We can now extend the argument above that a virtual conscious entity with a virtu-
al body would have to be distinct from its virtual world. Should we go further in limit-
ing the scope of describing something as conscious by restricting consciousness to the
entity's equivalent of the human nervous system (assuming it has one)? In normal
speech we do not do this in relation to humans – we refer to people as being con-
3
scious, not their brains, although most scientists accept that consciousness is produced
by the brain, or more precisely by parts of the brain. The reason for raising this point
here is that the part of a virtual entity that is capable of consciousness could in princi-
ple be copied into other virtual or real entities, and this could provide the basis for a
technology of conscious agents. However, if consciousness turned out to be insepara-
ble from the virtual body of the entity in which it had first been produced, the basis
for a technology would be much less clear.
Even if the correct answer to our original question is Yes, there will still be those
who refuse to accept that a virtual entity could be as conscious as we are because it
would lack some essential but unknown characteristic linked to physicality. This ar-
gument is distinct from arguments such as the one that only systems of biological
neurons can support consciousness – it is not the type of physicality that is at issue,
but physicality in itself. Proponents of this view would accept the possibility of a
physical robot becoming conscious, but not a virtual entity. In this context, it is inter-
esting to consider Metzinger's contention that the phenomenal self is itself a virtual
entity existing in a virtual world [2]. If this structure is indeed at the root of con-
sciousness, then a conscious virtual entity in its virtual world would have to possess
its own virtual self-model in its own virtual world model – a kind of recursion, and
Minsky's exploration of self-modelling should be borne in mind [3]. If correct, this
decoupling of our phenomenal self from our own physical substrate could imply that
the apparent consciousness of the phenomenal self of a virtual entity in a virtual world
would be as real and in some deep sense as valid as that of a physical entity in a phys-
ical world.
We argue now, somewhat against ourselves, that the relationship between a puta-
tive self model and its associated world model may not be comparable to that between
a real or virtual entity and their corresponding real or virtual worlds. A useful exam-
ple here is the artificial life software game Creatures, written by Steve Grand, and
first released in 1996 [4]. Players could rear, educate, and care for artificial creatures
that were modelled at the genetic, biochemical, and neural levels, and which could
interact with conspecifics and objects in their simulated world. However, the relation-
ship between the creatures and their world was not in terms of highly granular simu-
lated sensory perception and sophisticated learning leading to carefully graded and
controlled actions, but rather in terms of something closer to message passing be-
tween the creatures and the objects. This was a necessary consequence of the severely
limited available computational resources. The messages from an object effectively
signalled the type of the object, along with what would nowadays be called its af-
fordances – the actions that could be executed in response to the object by the crea-
ture, and their outcomes. A creature would then select a message specifying the se-
lected action, and the software would execute the appropriate script.
Apart from the phenomena of innate releasing mechanisms and fixed action pat-
terns, there is obviously no such message passing between physical organisms and
physical objects, and none is intrinsically necessary between virtual organisms and
virtual objects. However, if Metzinger's self models and world models exist, the sys-
tem supporting them can possess information about their possible interactions that in
principle could be made available to both self model and world model, potentially
4
creating something closer to the Creatures concept: a virtual entity's self model inter-
acting with an object in its world model would not have to engage in a perceptual and
behavioural learning process to establish and respond to the object's affordances – it
could simply be given them by the supporting system, and the object would similarly
behave appropriately as a result of any action by the self model. This hypothetical
process would be independent of the reality or virtuality of the original entity. There
is not the space here to trace any correspondences between the behaviour of these self
and world models and the experience of consciousness, but this does not matter: what
is important is the possible difference between their behaviour and that of of the base
level real or virtual entities and worlds. In passing we note that building the self and
world models using physics based modelling is a convenient but potentially limiting
way of enabling the support system to provide information about interaction to both
self and world models.
2 What is to be done?
Whether we are to create an artificial consciousness in order to understand natural
consciousness, or to provide a basis for a technology of consciousness, we have a
choice of doing it either in a real robot in the real world, or in a virtual robot in a vir-
tual world (or if experiencing social interaction with conspecifics is necessary to be-
come conscious, many real or virtual robots), or in both. From the point of view of
efficiency, tractability, access to information, and sheer practicality, the virtual option
beats the real option hands down. Working with real robots and the real world is slow
and difficult: robots break, age, wear out, need updating, are expensive, and need
constant engineering attention; the real world is incompletely knowable, and also
changes with time. Further, it is impossible to speed up real time, to which robots and
the real world are unavoidably confined, or to repeat an experiment exactly. With a
virtual approach, changes are easy, knowledge is in principle complete, multiple par-
allel implementations can be run, real time is not a constraint, and the base technology
improves at an exponential rate. Further, once artificial consciousness is achieved in a
virtual entity, the components supporting consciousness can in principle be connected
with, or cloned and inserted into, a real robot, because the only available means for
controlling a real robot is again the use of software running on a digital computer.
If we accept all of the foregoing, how should we structure an attempt to produce a
conscious physically embodied entity? To some extent this depends on the reasons for
wanting to create such an entity: is the primary aim scientific, the understanding of
consciousness and in particular human consciousness? or utilitarian, the deployment
of conscious physically embodied agents for some practical purpose, such as compan-
ion robots that do not deceive the user by merely pretending to be conscious? For the
first, the physically embodied entity need only exist in a limited, carefully designed
environment, but for the second a more open environment would have to be be target-
ed. Here we will only consider the first option, and the opportunities it offers.
For arranging a transition between the virtual and the real, the easiest and probably
most rewarding initial strategy would be to provide both real and virtual environ-
5
ments, and real and virtual embodiments, that were as similar as possible. For each of
these, the choice of strategy boils down to either creating the virtual component and
then building the real component to match, or starting with the real component and
modelling it in software to produce a corresponding virtual component. For many
reasons, the second option is to be preferred. Firstly, it enables the automatic con-
struction of parts of the virtual models from real data, which is much easier than do-
ing the opposite – in particular, the physical characteristics of objects in the real envi-
ronment can be used to programme the object parameters in the physics based model-
ling system. Secondly, it offers the prospect of a gradual migration from the virtual to
the real environment by using some real sensory data from the real environment, es-
pecially visual data, within the virtual world. Thirdly, the performance of the virtual
embodiment can be calibrated by measurements taken from the real embodiment,
rather than trying to build a real embodiment accurately matching the virtual embod-
iment. In this context it is worth noting that many available research robots are now
supplied along with their physics based models, and for others third-party models are
often available – for example [5].
In relation to consciousness, it is now quite well established (by research beginning
with [6]) that a normal individual's identification with his/her actual physical body is
quite labile, and that by various technical manipulations the sense of self can be trans-
ferred towards or even into other locations or embodiments. This may perhaps enable
the progressive substitution of more sophisticated embodiments as the project contin-
ues and technology advances, the implication being that after a period of adaptation
the old embodiment could be functionally replaced with the new without disturbing
the underpinnings of consciousness itself. If posssible, this will also validate part of
the potential path for the exploitation of conscious robots, although the move to an
open environment may prove a more serious problem. When asked why he insisted on
using real robots rather than making things easier by using simulations, Rod Brooks
replied that there was certainly no problem in simulating his relatively simple robots –
it was simulating the rest of the world that was difficult, and this might prove to be a
major problem if the strategy of developing conscious robots in simulation and mi-
grating them to reality turned out to be the only practical option.
3 Conclusion: Learning from an early effort
Several of the ideas discussed above were explored in the CRONOS project, an early
attempt [7] to build a robot with some features of consciousness. The central idea,
inspired by Craik's work [8] but in many ways similar to Metzinger's [9], was to build
a robot with a body similar to a human – an anthropomimetic robot – with a jointed
skeleton and compliant musculature, to equip it with an internal model of itself and its
immediate surroundings, and to investigate its cognitive abilities in relation to Ale-
ksander's axioms of consciousness [10], Metzinger's constraints [9] and Tononi's phi
[11]. It was of course only partially successful, but it provided many opportunities for
learning the lessons leading to the above formulation. The robot's skeleton was hand
moulded, and the robot was fitted out with a variety of poorly specified commercial
6
components. This was partly due to a scarcity of funds, and partly deliberate – our
biological components are generally of poor quality, with characteristics that are con-
stantly changing, yet the brain manages to control them very well indeed. It proved
almost impossible to control, and two European follow-on projects developing the
concept only managed to improve the controllability mainly by improving the engi-
neering [12, 13]. We hypothesised that the control strategies developed by the brain
might have some relevance for consciousness, and this is still a possibility, but if they
exist they remain unknown. If this hypothesis is discarded, using a conventionally
engineered and controlled robot is a sensible move. The robot's internal model,
SIMNOS, was built using the proprietary physics based software Ageia PhysX [14].
The hand-built and partially unknown nature of the robot made this an impossibly
difficult task, with an unsatisfactory outcome. The follow-on projects used more
modern and configurable modelling software, but the deficiencies of physics based
modelling are still a major problem. However, one pioneering CRONOS strategy, that
of using the physics based model as a primary virtual entity, and re-using the physics
based model as the primary entity's self model [15] probably offers a key strategy for
the eventual development of a conscious robot technology.
References
1. Manzotti, R.: An alternative process view of conscious perception. Journal of Conscious-
ness Studies, 13(6) pp. 45-79. Imprint, Devon (2006)
2. Metzinger, T.: The subjectivity of subjective experience: A representationalist analysis of
the first person perspective. In: Metzinger, T. (ed.) The Neural Correlates of Conscious-
ness. MIT Press, Cambridge (2000)
3. Minsky, M.L.: Matter, Mind, and Models. Proc. International Federation of Information
Processing Congress, vol. 1, pp. 45-49. (1965)
4. Grand, S.: Creation: Life and how to make it. Harvard University Press, Cambridge (2003)
5. gazebosim.org last accessed 2018/12/12
6. Petkova, V.I., Ehrsson, H.H.: If I Were You: Perceptual Illusion of Body Swapping. PLoS
ONE 3(12): e3832 (2008)
7. Holland, O.: A strongly embodied approach to machine consciousness. In: Chrisley, R.,
Clowes, R., Torrance, S. (eds.) Journal of Consciousness Studies Special Issue on Machine
Consciousness. Imprint, Devon (2007)
8. Craik, K.J.W.: The Nature of Explanation. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge (1943)
9. Metzinger, T.: Being No One: The Self-Model Theory of Subjectivity. MIT Press, Cam-
bridge (2003)
10. Aleksander, I., Dunmall, B.: Axioms and tests for the presence of minimal consciousness
in agents. Journal of Consciousness Studies, vol 10, pp.: 7-18. Imprint, Devon (2003)
11. Tononi, G.: An information integration theory of consciousness. BMC Neuroscience, 5
(1), pp. 42. (2004)
12. eccerobot.org last accessed 2018/12/12
13. https://cordis.europa.eu/project/rcn/102206_en.html last accessed 2018/12/12
14. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PhysX last accessed 2018/12/12
15. Marques, H.G.: Functional Embodied Imagination. Ph.D. thesis, University of Essex
(2010)