Ph.D. Thesis Proposal
Self-awareness is an aspect of consciousness that is highly developed in humans in comparison with other animals. A human being unaware of his or her personal characteristics, of what he or she knows and doesn't know, can do and cannot do, wants and doesn't want, has experienced and is experiencing, etc., would surely be difficult to communicate with naturally. Therefore we believe that consciousness plays a crucial role in building artificial dialog agents with human-level abilities.
We will provide an overview of consciousness as viewed in philosophy, biology and artificial intelligence, and we will present relevant work on agents that show abilities related to consciousness. Then we will present our plan to create a self-aware agent intended to overcome some of the limitations of the state of the art in this field.