Can a machine be conscious?

3:10 μ.μ. scienceddicted 0 Comments

After watching the movie "Her", which is about a man who falls in love with his operating system, and chatting with "Siri" Apple's intelligent personal assistant, i decided to write a post about how conscious a machine could be.







H.Caulfield at 'A general model of primitive consciousness' starts by explaining what we mean with the term "conscious". Specifically he underlines the subjective nature of the term, as each person use the external observation by a unique way through the senses. So since consciousness prerequιsite the cooperation of mind and body, how could a machine be conscious? For Caulfield the basic functions for the description of a behavior depend on the electrochemical structure of neurons, the anatomy of the mind and from their interaction with the environment.In this way the system works consciously as self-sustaining and gives a causal explanation for the internal operation of the mechanisms of consciousness. It looks like what Harnad was talking about at 'Forward and Reverse Engineering' relating to the distinction of heart and biological functions, but Caulfield highlights that biological function of a system is above the chemical one.Since the chemical composition of neurons is not the most important, we need to solve the Mind-Body problem. If we are unable to understand the dualistic character of our own nature, then how could we understand a machine? On the other hand even if we had solve the Mind-Body problem with specific scientific laws, these laws would have no power over the question of whether a machine is conscious, because as Descartes claimed there is always the possibility of an emperical risk.

       

In my opinion a machine is conscious since it is fully aware of the situation of its body and the way it should be controled. So  consciousness is not located in any part of the machine separately, but in how to control all of these sections. And i will use as an arguement the XCR-1 robot designed by P.Haikonen in 2012.  On the video below, the robot is presented to feel pain and even be able to relate this feeling with the color of the object it touched before being hit. Thus it is evident that the robot is fully aware of the its choices and its condition, and what gives to it the possibility of consciousness is not each part of the machine separately, but the software. About that Haikonen believes that only a hardware could have consciousness, because in the case of software all the emotions are geting lost by converting the informations to 1 and 0.                   

                     


So what is the difference between Artificial Intelligenci(AI) and the way a human brain works? The answer for the second is still being investigated by the Human Brain Project(HBP), which aims to achieve a multi-level, integrated understanding of brain structure and function through the development and use of information and communication technologies.Although the challenge in Artificial Intelligence (AI) is to design algorithms that can produce intelligent behaviour and to use them to build intelligent machines, in HBP the goal is to build data driven models that capture what we've learned about the brain experimentally: its deep mechanics (the bottom up approach) and the basic principles it uses in cognition (the top-down approach). So the technology will be based on what we know about the brain and its circuitry. Thus in HBP scientist will develop the same kind of intelligent behaviour-as happens to AI too, but the models will learn the same way the brain learns. In other words Siri, which is closer to an AI, is learning by her own software mistakes and choices, but a HBP model is learning and formed by the way a human brain and neuroscience would do.





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