Profile – Owen Holland (b. 1947)

Owen Holland is best known for his work on machine consciousness and for building biologically inspired robots, but he only started robotics as a hobby in 1988 after working as a production engineer, boatbuilder, transport manager, insurance salesman, and chef in a steak bar. He had a croft in Orkney for eight years where he built his own house and tended cows, goats, ducks, and chickens, grew oats, and made hay. Just as eclectically, he has had academic positions in psychology, electrical engineering, computer science, and cognitive robotics, at universities in England, Scotland, Germany, Switzerland, and the USA. He worked on two robot projects at Caltech and helped set up the robotics lab at the University of the West of England, Bristol. Holland used the biologically inspired robot CRONOS to ask whether it could be phenomenally conscious according to various theories of consciousness. CRONOS has since developed into the anthropomimetic ECCE Robot which, with its human-like structures, may lead to human-like cognition. He is now Emeritus Professor of cognitive robotics in the Sackler Centre for Consciousness Science at the University of Sussex.