ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses a fundamental postulate which relegates an artificial kind of consciousness to the working of a neural state machine. There is a legitimate attack among those who write about consciousness on the idea that there may be ‘computational’ models in the offing, as for example, advocated by Dennett. The problem with these attacks is that they are usually made on rule-based attempts at modelling and these focuses on the untenable position of a programmer who first has to work out what consciousness is and then write algorithms which model it. The personal sensations which lead to the consciousness of an organism are due to the firing patterns of some neurons, such neurons being part of a larger number which form the state variables of a neural state machine, the firing patterns having been learned through a transfer of activity between sensory input neurons and the state neurons. A postulate is a belief.
