Can Artificial Consciousness be Possible?

One of the hottest topics that modern science has been focusing on for a long time is the field of artificial intelligence, the study of intelligence in machines or, according to Minsky, “the science of making machines do things that would require intelligence if done by men”.(qtd in Copeland 1). Artificial Intelligence has a lot of applications and is used in many areas. “We often don’t notice it but AI is all around us. It is present in computer games, in the cruise control in our cars and the servers that route our email.” (BBC 1). Different goals have been set for the science of Artificial Intelligence, but according to Whitby the most mentioned idea about the goal of AI is provided by the Turing Test. This test is also called the

Turing, a physicalist, believed that artificial intelligence could be achieved in the future. Turing argued that the mind was merely due to the physical aspects of the brain and so a machine could one day be created that has a mind of its own, i.e. artificial intelligence. He created a test called the Turing Test to determine whether a machine has artificial intelligence. In the Turing Test, an interrogator asks two subjects a series of questions. One of the subjects is a person, the other is the computer. The goal is for the person to imitate a computer and the computer to imitate the person. If the interrogator is fooled into thinking that the computer is the human then the computer, according to Turing, is concluded to have the ability to think and thus, have a mind. Turing argued that machines passing the Turing Test were sufficient for ascribing thought.

would agree that yes, categorically, a machine could be conscious. But is it really that simple? I

So does consciousness exist outside the brain? Consciousness is defined as the state or quality of awareness, or, of being aware of an external object or something within oneself. Basically being aware enough to understand everything going on around you. Some would argue that consciousness is restricted to the brain and body only. If that were true then the brain would be able to operate outside the body but in reality cannot. Consciousness however, is utilized beyond the brain without any accusations of superstition as hundreds of experiments and millions of testimonials confirm it to be true. One out of many examples include psi researchers Charles Honorton and Diane Ferrari examining 309 precognition experiments carried out by sixty-two investigators involving 50,000 participants in more than two million trials. These studies were significant in showing that people can describe future events, something that can’t be done if our consciousness was so internalized. The odds that these results were not due to chance or random luck, but by actual skill or fact was greater than 10 to the twentieth power to one. Very high odds with a very high sample size representative of the general population for just one out of many experiments and tests. Consciousness is not something contained in our brain or minds but rather it’s an infinite, immediate and omnipresent phenomenon. It’s infinite because it is not confined to specific points in time or places like the brain. It’s immediate

hidden humans. In any given session, there would be six imitation games running in parallel, and one given interrogator would meet all five answering machines and five hidden humans. The authors claim that the judges and hidden humans involved all were selected from a wide variety of backgrounds—both male and female, both adults and teenagers, some who already knew about the Turing test beforehand and others who did not. In this paper, the authors examined the data they had acquired in the tests to study what constitutes good machine performance in Turing’s imitation game.

     Lesley J. Rogers describes consciousness as, “related to awareness, intelligence, and complex cognition, as well as language. Consciousness may be manifested in self-awareness, awareness of others, intentional behavior, including intentional communication, deception of others, and in the

Consciousness is a pivotal element in human existence. According to Max Velmans and Susan Schneider The Blackwell Companion to Consciousness: "Anything that we are aware of at a given moment forms part of our consciousness”. As important as it is, scientists have trouble in coining the exact definition for consciousness. Even more shockingly, there have been studies that claim human do not make conscious decisions as we have always believed, such as the article Unconscious determinants of free decisions in the human brain published by Nature Publishing Group in 2008, and in the BBC documentary The Secret You by Marcus du Sautoy.

Reading on the article “Will We Ever Understand Consciousness?” Scientists & Philosophers Debate was very intriguing. It imposes that consciousness is such an unbelievable magnesium and how unique the brain works due to the fact of how it give rise to fundamental action to the outside world and how separate it is from our bodies, minds, and souls. It states that the more we use our brains to think (known as consciousness), the more millions of neurons interact with each other to make sense of how put things together in the reality world; but the interesting part is that the mind itself is fundamentally incapable of comprehending itself, no matter how much scientist studies the brain. As I continue to read, it also go into details about self-awareness, and the brain activity of coma patients due to traumatic brain injury. The interesting fact is that how drugs or prescription medications can have such side effects to improve and disprove of one’s unconsciousness; like giving the prescription drug to treat Parkinson Disease also treat a person that has lost conscious, as well as knowing that we all experience unconsciousness every day, due to sleep. It also states that during sleep the neurons of the brain activity communication is much more localized and less complex during sleeping than during the times that we are awake because of

"The Imitation Game" is a film about Britain's darkest days in WWII and the life of Alan Turing. In 1939, an extremely intelligence group that needed to break the Nazi code, had been hired in Government Code and Cipher School at Bletchley Park. Their gathering was all about breaking Nazi codes, with the exception of Turing (Eliana Dockterman). Turing's machine, Christopher, required the reservation of £100,000 from the legislature or council to be built (Tnn). The machine at long last worked, however the group had moved toward keeping it a mystery from the British government because the Germans could know that the Nazi codes are broken, then they would make another one. Turing proposed to Joan Clarke, an individual from the code breakers, she

I do not think that science can answer questions like "What is consciousness?" or "Why does gravity exist?" for these seem to be imaginative questions, not scientific questions. Science might be able to tell us that certain things exist, but it can't answer the question as to why they exist. Furthermore, things like "gravity" and "consciousness" are simply things that we use to describe conditions of matters that we observe within the universe, so they seem to be within the region of philosophy.

With humans having an innate ability to control, who is controlling who: Humans, the mind, the brain, or the mind or brain behind the machine? Is a question that we could all be asking ourselves in the near future? With the rapid expansion of technology such as smart cars that are intelligent enough to leave the driving to the vehicle. Are we living in an era that we can witness artificial intelligence, the creation of machines built with minds or brains of their own? Many philosophers believe after discovering how the brain really works the possibilities are unlimited.

Are animals programmed to be slaves to nature or do they possess consciousness: the ability to be aware of one’s surroundings? While we don’t know what animals think or say, we can speculate on their brain activity and behavior in nature. As Darwin has said, “We differ from our closest relatives in degree, not kind.” We may not be as different from the animal kingdom as we have thought.

Consciousness is an idea that we have based on subjective experience and not based on anything that we can really measure or observe in brains. We know that there’s consciousness because we can self report it. In reality no one really knows what makes us conscious, or what parts of the brain are responsible for that, or what processes in the brain. There is no doubt that computers at some point might be powerful enough that they can just simulate a

Alan Turing put this argument forward in his 1950 paper "Computing Machinery and Intelligence”. His opening pages of the paper begin with the words; "I propose to consider the question, 'Can machines think?” (Alan Turing 1950). My main argument to this is that a computer does not have the ability to think, primarily because it was created rather than ‘born and raised’.

The emergence of human consciousness is a highly debated subject matter. Some people argue that either consciousness existed in other human beings, or it emerged at some instance during the process of evolution. It is pertinent to note that the proponents of the idea of emergence of consciousness during evolution believe that it was one of the adaptive features developed by humans in order to survive in the changing environment. This has been the most common view. Human consciousness is an integral section defining the abilities of a human being. As an adaptive feature in human beings, consciousness has a number of roles necessary for human survival. Adaptability in human beings is an outcome of the struggle to survival in a dynamic environment. The conventional theory on the emergence of consciousness is the development of a complex neural network in the brain. This is related to the pattern of the neural networks in the brain. However, within this theory, there are subsets of thoughts that explain the synchronous oscillations in the neural networks. With evidence, this study will seek to show the superior and complex nature of human consciousness compared to other organisms (Rychlak, 1997).