Consciousness as a formal field of study has witnessed rapid growth in the areas of psychological, philosophical, biological, and computational research in recent years. In particular there has been a bloom of published work related to the replication of humanlike consciousness via hardware and software applications (Aleksander, Haikonen, Holland, Kurzweil and many others) culminating with the release of the new Internationational Journal of Machine Consciousness just a few days before this writing. In theory, if first person consciousness (Chalmers) can be understood clearly and quantitatively enough, intelligent agents can be engineered to replicate it.

The vast majority of machine consciousness projects to date have focused on developing learning protocols that operate in real time within real or virtual environments. The goal of the Lifenaut Project has been to create a diverse, large-scale database consisting of real people's personality archives such that future intelligent agents can learn rapidly by uploading archived data rather than experiencing events in real time. A learning protocol such as this would increase the rate of progress in the field of machine consciousness and may be more effectively tested than real time learning protocols, since in many cases a frame of reference will exists for comparison with the replicated consciousness.

A web-based personality archiving architecture (lifenaut.com) has been created and promoted to the general public as such. Through this web-based interface anyone worldwide with an internet connection can create a "mindfile" free of charge. The mindfile consists of: personality test results, personal profile data, uploaded biographical media, and an archive of the user's lines of conversation with a chatbot. Since its kickoff in 2006, Lifenaut has undergone 3 major iterations and each user's mindfile is tapped into the iCogno chatbot engine combined with an InterMediaLab photo-based avatar. At the time of this writing 8,702 from around the globe have created Lifenaut accounts. Agents resulting from long-term user interaction with the Lifenaut software will be tested with the ConsScale 2 consciousness taxonomy (Arrables-Moreno).

In this paper we present the Lifenaut project as a work in progress, discuss the current Lifenaut infrastructure within the context of Searle's "Chinese Room", and discuss the future implications of the project on the field of machine consciousness. Opening up the Lifenaut database to experimentation by the machine consciousness community will provide information about which hybrids of cognitive computing tactics produce the beginnings of meaningful consciousness replication. The development of these kinds of technologies will in turn inform other areas of consciousness research, i.e. neuroscience, psychology, philosophy, etc. and long-term machine consciousness research projects such as this one may be seen as cogs in the larger process of a transformation in the identity of society to include non-biological beings.