I’ve been reading Daniel Dennett’s Consciousness Explained and specifically looking at how his theory would be applied to creating artificial consciousness in a robot or software program.  Dennett makes a few key points that would have to be taken into account in developing artificial conscsciousness:

1. There is no central meaner, no executive decision maker.  Instead the brain is massively parallel, ideas come and go, actions and words are bubbling up everywhere and the best ones that fit best are the ones that get said or acted on.
2. Consciousness is effectively software running on the brains hardware.  The consciousness is a serial virtual machine running on the parallell architecture of the brain.
3. All of the parts of the brain are multifunction.  And different part’s functions overlap.  As Dennett says: “human engineers … design systems in which each element plays a single role, carefully insulated from interference from outside, in order to minimize the devestation of unforeseen side effects.”  He goes on to say the brain was designed by a process that thrives on “multiple superimposed functionality, something systematically difficult to discern from reverse engineering.”
4. The brain’s memory is not direct access memory (RAM) like a computer’s memory.  Instead things are brought back up and remembered by association and free thinking.  In addition, there is no definite boundary between program and memory as in a computer.
5. Many current researchers are working on modelling and researching the parts of the brain on the periphery, the parts that receive inputs from the vision or hearing.  But by working from the outside in, these researchers leave a lot to be explained by the eventual central point, where a lot of the consciosness may be in these peripheral parts of the brain.
6. The development of the brain and of life is very dependent on chaos.  Evolution depends on random variation in genes for it to select from, the brain was developed out of chaotic processes that hit upon chance processes and “serendipitous side effects.”

These are just a few of the ideas that I think need to be taken into account when drawing up a plan for artificial consciousness.