Towards the development of machine consciousness: Implications of Western philosophy and Buddhism

This paper presents a comparative study of perspectives from Western philosophy and Buddhism on higher cognitive functions of learning, knowledge and consciousness. This study actuated from the foundational work completed to develop an incremental learning algorithm with a knowledge acquiring disposition to address limitations in learning continuous data spaces. The morphological development of this algorithm, the Incremental Knowledge Acquiring Self-Learning (IKASL) algorithm, was motivated by abstractions of the thought process from Western philosophy and cognitive psychology while findings in neuroscience instigated the functional development. Despite the contrasting nature of the fundamental principle of Western philosophy and Buddhism, the explication of mental functions from the two schools of thought presents a case for comparison. We present this comparison followed by a discussion of potential implications of Buddhist teachings towards the development of a computational model that is indicative of machine consciousness.