Abstract

What are the roots of artificial consciousness? Surprisingly, in 1962, an Hungarian scholar of cybernetics used the term for the first time. The dominant scientific culture of the '50s and '60s was worried by the mentalist risk of such term and therefore most authors opted for the more reassuring flag of artificial intelligence. Yet, in the past ten years, there has been an increasingly widespread upsurge of interest in the subjective aspects of the mind. The unsatisfactory outcomes of many leading approaches such as functionalism or neurocentrism allow the proponents of machine consciousness to reconsider more seriously the subjective aspects of the mind.