Abstract

According to Allen Newell, it is necessary to distinguish "awareness" and "consciousness". The first is implicated in abilities such as attention, selection, planning, reporting, and cognitive modelling is actually successful in explaining them; the second concerns the subjective side of this activity. Whether cognitive modelling would grasp the subjective or phenomenological aspects of consciousness is anyone's guess. This could be seen as the "hard problem" for artificial consciousness. I briefly try to show how this problem was dealt with earlier in the field of machine consciousness, and why it is still an open problem in cognitive science.