ABSTRACT
This chapter considers the attribution of consciousness to artificial rational agents whose functioning falls short of the ideal Cyborg, under the assumption that neuroscience does not yield conceptually challenging causal set-ups in the brain such as functional or quasi-functional preemption. Application of the notion of conscious attention to robots encounters the difficulty. A rational agent might be given a free-floating self-identification unit: At the onset, everything is identified as self or might be identified as self so long as it is present to consciousness or present to attention. The chapter is concerned with the problem of consciousness attribution to a rational agent that does not develop ego consciousness but, instead, is capable only of operating from a purely objective self-identification. There is the self-consciousness that any rational agent must have simply by virtue of its representational and information processing apparatus.
