Conscious Machines: Memory,
Melody, and Muscular Imagination
Susan Stuart
University of Glasgow
North American Computing and Philosophy Conference
26-28 July 2007
Loyola University, Chicago
S.Stuart@philosophy.arts.gla.ac.uk
http://www.gla.ac.uk/departments/philosophy/Personnel/susan/

Main Points
1. You need a body to think, and not just because it houses
the brain
2. Muscular activity and questioning as necessary producing
informative visceral and emotional responses
3. The development of an anticipatory muscular and
cognitive response to experience enables the agent to form
(i) a depiction -the sensation of being ‘out-there’
[Aleksander & Dunmall 2003]
(ii) muscular imagination: non-cognitive expectations about
how their world will continue to be
(iii) a posteriori environmental, interpersonal, social and
cultural concepts
4. All of 3 (i) - (iii) are necessary for the formation of
effective judgements.

SACs & WACs
Holland [2003] distinguishes between weak and strong
artificial consciousness
WACs suggestive of conscious inessentialism
“[F]or any intelligent activity i, performed in any cognitive
domain d, even if we do i with conscious accompaniments, i
can in principle be done without these conscious
accompaniments.” [Flanagan 1992, p.5]
But a WAC, like disembodied intelligent action, is infeasible.

Consciousness & Thought
“There is a need to ... move from a reductionist, a temporal,
disembodied, static, rationalist, emotion- and culture-free
view, to fundamentally richer understandings that include
the primacy of action, intention, emotion, culture, real-time
constraints, real-world opportunities, and the peculiarities of
living bodies.” [Freeman & Núñez, 1999, p.ix]
The enactive system “[t]hrough a network consisting of
multiple levels of interconnected, sensorimotor
subnetworks”, possesses a “structural coupling that brings
forth a world”. [Varela, et al. 1991, p.206]

The Essential Body
“... there are no eternally fixed representations of the external
world in the “motor system” rather, it is under the guidance
of both internal and external factors with important linkages
to frontal, parietal, cerebellar, basal ganglionic, and cingulate
gyrus areas that subserve cognitive and motivational
activities. Indeed, the motor system including related
structures, is a self-organizing dynamical system contexted
among musculoskeletal, environmental ... and social forces.
We do not simply inhabit our bodies; we literally use them to
think with.” [Seitz 2000]
The outcome of all intellectual activity is some action.

Muscular Engagement
We are plenisentient; in our muscular movement we ask
questions about our world. [Cotterill, 1998]
Through a sensori-affective ‘felt’ dynamics we build up
non-conscious intentional expectations.
Muscular movement is not our only kind of enquiry, all our
senses in their search of the world, establish an experiential
history through prehension, and the syntheses of apprehension,
reproduction, and recognition.
In spinal cord injury (SCI) and the absence of direct afferent
input and efferent feedback from the somato-sensory motor
cortex sensory the brain hallucinates input. (Cole 2005)

Memory and Melody
Kinaesthetic Memory
“[A]ny movement creates a distinctive kinetic dynamics in
virtue of its spatio-temporal-energic qualities.”
Sheets-Johnstone (2006)
Kinaesthetic Melodies
“In the initial stages of formation of any movement [the] chain
must consist of a series of isolated impulses; with the
development of motor skills the individual impulses are
synthesized ... into integral kinaesthetic structures or kinetic
melodies”
Luria (1973) The Working Brain, p.176

Phantom vibrations & the feelSpace belt
Cell phones
feelSpace belt
Peter König, University of Osnabrück
wide beige belt lined with 13 vibrating pads - same weight-
and-gear modules that make a cell phone judder
outside of the belt - a power supply and a sensor that
detected Earth's magnetic field
whichever buzzer was pointing north would judder

The Essential Emotions
Emotions - defined as spontaneous neural and chemical
responses to changes in the agent's physiological state -
play a central role in the agent's homeostatic functioning.
“[T]he subjective process of feeling emotions is partly
grounded in dynamic neural maps, which represent
several aspects of the organism's continuously changing
internal state.” [Damasio et al. 2003, p.1049]
The body's pre-reflective, pre-cognitive affective activity
which acts to underpin the agent's successful adaptive
behaviour.
Saliency tagging - prioritising of relevant criteria /
dismissal of irrelevant criteria

Emotions and Bodily Damage
Ventro-medial frontal cortex - Phineas Gage & EVR
Endogenous intersubjectivity [Gallagher 2007] - the
practical knowledge of oneself that guides one's actions
from the inside out
... but also the amygdala, the anterior cingulate cortex, the
cerebellum, the brain stem, and the hypothalamus
Cerebellum - associative learning - its maldevelopment
may affect social and cognitive development
(extrapyramidal tracts) brainstem + (corticospinal tracts)
motor cortex - indicate that cognition follows action

Conclusion
Conscious inessentialism is a false doctrine
WACs (philosophical zombies) are impossible
Effective affective decisions need
a body with a subtle musculature and nervous system
such that it can, through action and repetition, develop
its muscular memory, individual muscular melodies,
and its enactive muscular imagination.