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The Self-Aware Robot 
– A Response to Reactions to Discovery News –

This book describes a conscious robot, which is the world’s first successful result of mirror image cognition.

The descriptions in this book are easy enough for beginners without expertise to understand.

What are the mechanisms of human consciousness?

This book is intended to unravel this mystery.

This book was written by the developer of the self-Aware robot.
This robot has a system of cognizing itself in a mirror.
That self-conscious mechanism is made up of recurrent neural networks.
The robot utilizes a common neuron group K in the process of cognizing information obtained from sensors and the process of executing actions by the robot, and the robot has a nerve circuit to represent that neuron group.
In addition, this robot has the feature of recurring behavioral information to K through somatic nerves.
Simply put, this robot always cognizes external information from sensors and information about its somatic feeling (information out of the body and information inside the body) simultaneously as representations.
This means that this robot discriminates itself from others.
This conscious mechanism learns visual imitations and can perform imitations.

In addition, this book explains that it is possible to construct the emotion part, feeling part and association part in the robot using that conscious mechanism.
It shows the possibility of connecting the robot’s consciousness with emotion and feelings, although the robot still has a simple structure at present.
It also describes sub-consciousness and explicit consciousness.
Finally, it explains the feelings of the robot, i.e., the qualia problem, and the problem of free will and responsibility.

The web version of the Discovery Channel in the United States gave an account of this robot on December 21, 2005. In the couple of weeks that followed, more than 26,000 websites all over the world carried secondary items related to the robot.

In addition, a lot of web forums had vigorous discussions and carried related information on their websites. Views in these discussions represented those both for and against the reported development.

As the writer of this book, I would like to take the opportunity to introduce the essence of those opinions and provide answers to the questions that were raised.

The article on the Discovery Channel had a tremendous and wide influence. Even more than six months after, the keyword “self-aware” ranked fourth in about 120 million Google searches. And, of course among researchers’ reports, it was in first place.