The Aspects, the Origin, and the Merit of Aware Computing

In this paper we tried to understand scientifically the awareness, a daily word. Some aspects of awareness, such as qualitative or quantitative, the targets of awareness, either the external world or the internal world, were discussed. Suggestion on the human awareness was described from the experimental results of visual hand tracking. The origin and the merit of awareness in the process of evolution of animals were discussed. Finally some characters of possible aware computers and aware robots were studied. 1. Introduction For the scientists and the engineers to understand and to make use of the human ability, it is needed to translate into scientific terms, the words of human science expressing the human ability, which has been created in a long history. awareness is a word in human science. Now we are asking what it is explained in scientific terms. Awareness in human science term naturally implies existence of a subject. There is no awareness in a system which has no subject. Subject implies existence of a central information processing system and an exterior self-expression device. There is no subject which has no mind and body. In the history of biological evolution, brain was originally created to produce information for body motion effective for survival against external change. A sensorial system was also created simultaneously to check the effectiveness of the motion. In this paper, we survey how this word has been used in our daily life. We analyze them and try to extract essential factors and try to discuss them by scientific terms (Section 2). We also refer to the results of our recent experiments of visual tracking [1–4]. These experimental results suggested that two kinds of awareness exist in the human sensorial-motor system, which functions in the mutually exclusive manner (Section 3). Combination of the various aspects of the awareness, which we used in daily life and some experimental implication, has led us to believe that “usefulness” may be a keyword to understand the awareness and to apply the concept of awareness for the aware computers and aware robots. Thus, the paper is constructed in the following order: (1)some aspects of awareness,(2)experimental suggestions on the concept of awareness,(3)usefulness of awareness,　(4)awareness of the internal world and mind, (5)aware computer,(6)an aware robot which behaves as if it had a free will. 2. Some Aspects of Awareness In this section, we examine some sentences including awareness used in daily life and try to find some aspects among them. 2.1. Qualitative and Quantitative “I am