On artificial brains

After a brief discussion about the purposes that might be followed in the creation of an artificial brain, we describe an approach using guidance of the human brain in the project GNOSYS, an EU project to construct a reasoning robot. This is extended to develop the underlying principles of an autonomous artificial brain. How this might be created so as to include consciousness is considered briefly through the CODAM model, and constraints arising from the attempt to provide phenomenological experience to the artificial brain outlined. The most important, conjectured to be that of the brain containing active neurons, leads to the problem of restricted neuronal fan-in and fan-out. The paper concludes on the importance of solving this problem.