The Consciousness of Non-Natural System

The construction of non-natural systems endowed with a consciousness similar to that of human beings is one of the most challenging problems that science presently faces. Manifold reasons justify this situation, amongst which one is prevailing : that in spite of the countless papers written about it, our knowledge of the origins of human consciousness is practically null. This paper ventures a fresh way of regarding these questions following two unconventional approaches : (i) Pask's Conversation Theory (CT) which is introduced here as a means of providing a new epistemological/computational tack to the whole question, and (ii) a scrutiny of the relations baby/mother that will work as a prototype for the emergence of consciousness in artificial systems. The convergence of CT with the 'mechanisms' underlying such relations frames a theoretical and practical construct - an experimental robot named ACB2 - in which features belonging to a selfconscious being can already be witnessed.