The Biological Principles Needed to Engineer Conscious AI

Gerald Edelman's ten-step Roadmap to a Conscious Artifact is reconstructed in this article using notes from a 2006 discussion at The Neurosciences Institute. The roadmap lays out the fundamentals for creating a machine that is fully conscious, starting with value systems, thalamo-cortical dynamics, and reentrant neural architectures and on to motor control, language, and developmental learning. Every step demonstrates Edelman's belief that embodied, self-organizing biological principles, not symbolic computation, are the source of consciousness. Fifteen years after it was first proposed, this framework is still among the most comprehensive and physiologically based models of artificial consciousness.