Inner Speech and Self-Awareness

Posted 3 Sep 2004 at 16:22 UTC by steve

Does your robot have an inner monolog? If so, it may be on the road to self-awareness according to ideas presented in a recent paper by Alain Morin of Mount Royal College. Alain's paper, Possible links between self-awareness and inner speech: Theoretical background, inner mechanisms, and empirical evidence (PDF format), provides evidence that our self-awareness comes from nothing more mysterious than the brain's ability to use language to talk to and about itself. Perhaps no quantum effects, neural electromagnetics fields, or other strange phenomena are needed to explain it. This would support arguments for the possibilty of machine intelligence.

Missing references, posted 4 Sep 2004 at 07:18 UTC by motters » (Master)

I notice that the paper doesn't mention work of the psychologists Vygotsky and Piaget, who both recognised the importance of internalised speech in the 1920s.