Consciousness and Creativity

It is a commonly held view that “there is a crucial barrier between computer models of minds and real minds: the barrier of consciousness” and thus that information-processing and the conscious experience of raw sensations1 are conceptually distinct [12]. Indeed, Cartesian theories typically describe cognition in terms of its objective and subjective as- pects, so breaking down the ‘problem of mind’ into what David Chalmers [7] calls the ‘easy’ problem of perception - the classification, identification and processing of sensory (and concomitant neural) states - and a corresponding ‘hard’ problem, which is the real- ization of the associated raw phenomenal experience of sensation. The difference between the easy and the hard problems - and the apparent lack of a link between theories of the former and an account of the latter - has been termed the ‘explanatory-gap’. But is consciousness experience a necessary prerequisite for the realisation of cognition and genuine mental states in all entities - both natural and artificial?