Next-generation approaches to machine consciousness

A spate of recent international workshops have demonstrated that machine consciousness is a swiftly emerging field of international presence. Independently, there have been several new developments in cognitive science and consciousness studies concerning the nature of experience and how it may best be investigated. Synthesizing results from embodied AI, phenomenology and hermeneutics in Philosophy, Neuroscience and enactive Psychology (among others), new paradigms for research into natural consciousness that transcend the limited behavioural/cognitive or neural/functional oppositions are being proposed and tested, with encouraging results. This paper gives an overview of some work that attempts to entwine these two strands to see how they might be of mutual benefit to each other.