What is the relationship between the experience of visual perception and the underlying neuronal activity in the visual system? Dr. Francis Crick and I propose that the function of visual awareness is to produce an interpretation of the visual scene and to make it available, for a sufficient time, to the parts of the brain that contemplate, plan and execute voluntary motor outputs. This suggest that the neurons that express the neural correlate of consciousness must project from visual cortices to the frontal lobe. I will discuss electrophysiological, clinical and psychophysical evidence for this hypothesis. Finally, I will discuss the implications that such a strategy has for designing machine architectures that express some degree of awareness.