Owen Holland Editorial

In May 2001, the Swartz Foundation sponsored a workshop called ‘Can a machine be conscious?’ at the Banbury Center in Long Island (http://www. swartzneuro.org/banbury_2001.cfm). Around twenty psychologists, computer scientists, philosophers, physicists, neuroscientists, engineers, and industrialists spent three days in a mixture of short presentations and long and lively discussions. At the end, Christof Koch, the chair, asked for a show of hands to indicate who would now answer ‘Yes’ to the question forming the workshop theme. To everyone’s astonishment, all hands but one were raised. We had not asked the question at the beginning, and so we did not know if any minds had changed during the workshop, but I think we all realized the significance of this nearunanimous vote: the idea of machine consciousness had progressed from being an interesting philosophical diversion to a real possibility. Later that year, the editors of the Journal of Consciousness Studies agreed that the topic would be suitable for a special issue of the journal, and submissions were invited from some of the Banbury workshop participants, and from others interested in the subject. I am grateful to all of the contributors for their co-operation and collaboration in bringing this collection together, and to the referees for the care with which they undertook their task. Special thanks go to Joseph Goguen, editor-in-chief of the JCS, and to managing editor Anthony Freeman for his patience and assistance throughout the project. Igor Aleksander has spent several years engineering artificial neural systems to investigate and demonstrate various aspects of visual consciousness, particularly those involving imagination and imagery. One consequence is that he has probably spent more time than anyone else discussing and defending the notion that a machine might possess at least some of the attributes of consciousness. In their contribution to this collection, he and Barry Dunmall do not present a new neural model, but instead propose an axiomatic framework within which the structural and functional components of conscious systems, natural or artificial, can be identified and tested. They note: ‘We deem this to be useful if there is ever to be clarity in answering questions about whether this or the other organism is or