Includes bibliographical references and index.

How do "minds" work? In Exploring Robotic Minds: Actions, Symbols, and Consciousness as Self-Organizing Dynamic Phenomena, Professor Jun Tani reviews key experiments within his own pioneering neurorobotics research project aimed at answering this fundamental and fascinating question. The book shows how symbols and concepts representing the world can emerge via "deep learning" within robots, by using specially designed neural network architectures by which, given iterative interactions between top-down proactive "subjective" and "intentional" processes for plotting action, and bottom-up updates of the perceptual reality after action, the robot is able to learn to isolate, to identify, and even to infer salient features of the operational environment, modifying its behavior based on anticipations of both objective and social cues. Through permutations of this experimental model, the book then argues that longstanding questions about the nature of "consciousness" and "freewill" can be addressed through an understanding of the dynamic structures within which, in the course of normal operations and in a changing operational environment, necessary top-down/​bottom-up interactions arise.