Something a bit different – an engineer’s view of conciousness.

Every so often I see articles on the Internet explaining conciousness in terms of vibrations or quantum theory. However, I think these are over complicating the issue. We can approach the problem from an engineering viewpoint and I think the reason for conciousness emerges.

This isn’t an idea I’m claiming for my own – I came across it when researching robotics in the 1990s. However, I haven’t seen it explained anywhere recently so it is probably worth writing down. If you can spot holes in the idea then please comment below.

TLDR: conciousness is a necessary part of creatures that learn how to interact with the world.

A simple problem with a simple robot

Imagine a simple mobile robot. It has:

• Not much weight – it doesn’t matter if it bumps into things
• Two motors driving two wheels
• Two touch sensors – one at the front at the left and one at the front at the right.
• Some kind of neural network that connects the touch sensors to the motor controls.
• Programming that tells the robot that it must keep moving forward, so that if it stops it needs to reprogram its neural network so it can move forward.

We put this robot into a maze and see what happens.

If we’ve got it right (and there are no dead ends – discussed later) then the robot learns to turn left when the right touch sensor hits something, and turn right when the left sensors hits something.