Conceptor: a Model of selected Consciousness Features including Emergence of Basic Speech Structures in Early Childhood Konrad R. Fialkowski & Boleslaw K. Szymanski Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, Troy, NY 12180, USA Email: fialkows@rpi.edu , szymansk@rpi.edu Keywords: consciousness, speech, brain structure, phrases We have proposed that an information-processing machine called conceptor can model some aspects of consciousness. Conceptor was designed as a technical device for information processing (Fialkowski, 1995) that utilizes neither numerical representation (numbers) nor numerical operations (arithmetic), as opposed to computers. It was found to posses some features that may be appropriate for modeling elements of consciousness (Fialkowski, 1999a). Conceptor is an attribute-based machine that automatically generates concepts from descriptors of a dynamically changing environment. The conceptor is connected to its environment thorough its input that periodically produces a set of descriptors characterizing the current state of the environment. Conceptor’s main task is to create, in a solely inductive manner, a coherent and condensed representation of reality (constituting its working environment) that is derived exclusively from observations of that reality. In this approach the concepts are dynamic entities, growing from concept seeds and can be created at any level of the conceptor processing. The conceptor itself establishes connections between related concepts in growth. Both the concepts and the connections are dynamically adjusted by new information from input. The representation of the environment established in the conceptor can be probed through directives. The result is an “illumination” of all concepts transitively related to those listed in a directive. The illumination is defined by both the character and strength of the relations. The conceptor design also facilitates conditional directives. The if -directive is the equivalent of a gedanken experiment, answering, for example, a query what would the representation be, if two unrelated concepts were equivalent. The soundness of the proposed approach can be derived inductively from the uniformity of the conceptor processing at all levels and the successful simulation of its lowest level. An entry point for considering some properties of the conceptor for consciousness modeling was Dennett’s (1992, p. 256) statement that: “…cognitive scientists (…) are right to insist that you don’t really have a good model of consciousness until you solve the problem of what functions it [the brain] performs and how it performs them - mechanically, without benefit of Mind. As Philip Johnson-Laird puts it, “Any scientific theory of the mind has to treat it as an automaton” (Johnson-Laird, 1983, p. 477).” (emphasis added). The conceptor has been designed as an automaton. The following conceptor’s features have been stressed for consciousness modeling (Fialkowski 1999a,b) and later developed by us towards modeling of more advanced consciousness features including, as discussed later here, basic speech structures. 1. According to Dennett (p.166): “…an element of content becomes conscious (…) not by entering some functionally defined and anatomically located system, but by changing state right where it is: by acquiring some property (…). The idea that consciousness is a mode of action of the brain rather than a subsystem of the brain has much to recommend it (see e.g., Kinsbourne, 1980; Neumann, 1990; Crick and Koch, 1990).” (emphasis added). The conceptor offers, as a model, all features suggested by the researchers quoted above. In the conceptor, illumination is a “mode of action” and may be performed in any part of the network “by acquiring some property right where it is”. 2. Two researchers: Marr (1982) and Jackendoff (1987) propose three levels of analysis present in the mental phenomenon. Conceptor offers three such levels. 3. If illumination can be treated in terms of “what the conceptor is conscious of”, then the performance of the conceptor is in agreement with both Jackendoff’s and Johnson- Lairds’s claims that whatever we are conscious of is rather a result of processing than processing itself. Illumination is not processing, but a result of it. Each illumination results from the processing being performed at the lowest level and is a kind of its representation. 4. In the conceptor, initiation of an illumination is performed through activation of one or many own nests, Art, Technology, Consciousness mind@large, Intellect Press, Bristol, U.K., 2000, pp. 185-190