3.5 Perspectives on Machine Consciousness 51 e doso in such a way as to lead to self and attentional focus as emergent structures that serve as approximate attractors of this dynamic, over time periods that are long relative to the basic “cognitive cycle time” of the system’s forward-analysis dynamics To prove the truth of a hypothesis of this nature would seem to require mathematics fairly far beyond anything that currently exists. Nonetheless, however, we feel it is important to formulate and discuss such hypotheses, so as to point the way for future investigations both theoretical and pragmatic. 3.5 Perspectives on Machine Consciousness Finally, we can’t let a chapter on philosophy — even a brief one — end without some discussion of the thorniest topic in the philosophy of mind: consciousness. Rather than seeking to resolve or comprehensively review this most delicate issue, we will restrict ourselves to giving it in Appendix ?? an overview of many of the common views on the subject; and here in the main text discussing the relationship between consciousness theory and patternist philosophy of cognition, the practical work of designing and building AGI. One fairly concrete idea about consciousness, that relates closely to certain aspects of the CogPrime design, is that the subjective experience of being conscious of some entity X, is corre- lated with the presence of a very intense pattern in one’s overall mind-state, corresponding to X. This simple idea is also the essence of neuroscientist Susan Greenfield’s theory of consciousness [GreO1] (but in her theory, "overall mind-state" is replaced with "brain-state"), and has much deeper historical roots in philosophy of mind which we shall not venture to unravel here. This observation relates to the idea of "moving bubbles of awareness" in intelligent systems. If an intelligent system consists of multiple processing or data elements, and during each (suf- ficiently long) interval of time some of these element