Artificial intelligence is concerned with the development of computer systems that simulate human reasoning when they are applied to the domain of rational knowledge. More specific subdomains are structured by ontologies, which enable the development of systems that use this knowledge with great subtlety when questions are posed to them. This is true today of all computers and small portable devices that enable communication via the Internet on countless websites. All of these systems are therefore made to replace specialists and to help humans with their endeavors. Evolution has led to a connection between computer science and the physical, especially the electronic, which has made it possible to introduce rational behaviors into physical systems whose behavior is thereby rendered autonomous. This is how robotization has developed and continues to progress. The human being considers themselves as the pre-eminent creator, supervisor and decision-making user of these systems. This is no longer the case, since the user of a tablet or smart phone is not on their tablet or smart phone but in the device’s native environment. These devices can communicate autonomously via a Hertzian network with remote systems and can make recommendations that were absolutely not requested, all while refining the user’s consumer profile.

And they can do much more. These computerized systems, all of which are systems with processors and memory, can be equipped with the ability to generate forms of intentional thoughts, to have desires and needs, and to inundate a human user in sets of procedures that they can no longer control, that are beyond them. These systems can be equipped with a psyche similar to the human psyche.

That is what this book intends to show: how the architecture of a human psychic system can be structured in an organizational approach, how a human being generates thoughts and how those thoughts then become what they feel; it then aims to show how and with what types of computer component this psyche can be transposed to transform it into a computer system that expresses an artificial consciousness. Thus, we will see how the unconscious, preconscious and artificial consciousness are structured and organized, and how all of that is brought together, with respect to information and energy, with a fourth instance: the organizational layer.

The model of the human psychic system that we will present is founded on an approach that unifies both the bottom-up and top-down approaches. The bottom-up approach considers the system to be made up of many small, highly connected parts and asks how it generates representational forms concerning the sensation of corporeality and especially the representation of symbolic evaluations of real-world objects at very high linguistic and conceptual levels. The top-down approach begins from ontologies of knowledge about everything we know how to represent cognitively and asks how to define the hierarchies of systems that express all of the categories of this knowledge from all points of departure. The unification of these two approaches is organizational and amounts to developing a system that deploys the same kind of morphologically and semantically structured components that define both foundational forms as well as those of great conceptual scope, and which ensure – especially on their own – control over multiple levels like an organizational layer.

And finally, we will see that the development of a model of the artificial psychic system by substituting the human psyche is a scientific approach that precedes building a technology for autonomous systems, and adopting a constructivist and organizational view will allow us to clarify certain characteristics of the human psyche. Science cultivates knowledge that can be shared with all disciplines and also makes it possible to ask ethical questions about its achievements. The development and subsequent exploitation of artificial psychic systems that are equipped with intentional consciousness must necessarily raise questions concerning potential uses or even the justification of a decision not to build such systems. Therefore, the ethical question concerning the potential applications of artificial consciousnesses must now clearly be asked.