Machine Consciousness and Machine Intelligence are not simply new buzzwords
that occupy our imagination. Over the last decades, we witness an unprecedented
rise in attempts to create machines with human-like features and capabilities.
However, despite widespread sympathy and abundant funding, progress in these
enterprises is far from being satisfactory. The reasons for this are twofold:
First, the notions of cognition and intelligence (usually borrowed from human
behavior studies) are notoriously blurred and ill-defined, and second, the
basic concepts underpinning the whole discourse are by themselves either
undefined or defined very vaguely. That leads to improper and inadequate
research goals determination, which I will illustrate with some examples drawn
from recent documents issued by DARPA and the European Commission. On the other
hand, I would like to propose some remedies that, I hope, would improve the
current state-of-the-art disgrace.