Can Robots Be Conscious?

“trillion mindless robots dancing”

definition of consciousness

Consciousness is one of the most fascinating topics in philosophy, science, and religion. Yet it’s also one of the least understood. Daniel Dennett has been one of my longest-serving influences on these 3 subjects. His book “Consciousness Explained” is beautifully written. Thought-provoking to anyone interested in understanding our minds better.

“ trillion mindless robots dancing”. This quote from Daniel Dennett describes his idea that if a system becomes more complex, it may become conscious. But how?

Let me give you an example. Let’s say we come up with a computer system that can:

• make sense of the world in real-time (processing visual, tactile, and auditory information).

• store events in its memory (for later analysis), process them, and make decisions accordingly.

• execute these decisions and send signals to our muscles to move accordingly.

I believe that even if such a system existed, they could be conscious in the eyes of the observer. I think that we are already somewhat conscious in the same way.

The main factor that differentiates us from machines is our ability to understand the world and ourselves. When we look at a person acting like a machine, it’s easy to see that they don’t have a sense of self. But when we look at someone like us — an animal, rather than any sort of machine — they do have a sense of self.

For a long time, I’ve been trying to understand exactly what it means to be conscious. Is the consciousness hardwired in our brains, as some scientists believe? Or does it come from the experience of being alive and aware? Can we explain consciousness away by saying that it’s an illusion created by our brain? As I got more interested in this subject, a pattern started to emerge.

In everyday life, we make many decisions based on “feeling” rather than “thinking.” For example, we may decide to sit down to write a blog post because we feel motivated, inspired, or in the mood to write. But is this decision based on what we “know” about writing a blog post, or is it based on our feelings?

It’s the same with anything else that’s important in our lives: love, happiness, compassion — none of these things work unless there is also an emotional component. Sometimes our feelings are based on rational thinkers, but often we don’t even know the source of our feelings. Even though we think we are deciding things based on logic, in reality, we are mostly acting on our feelings.

So is it possible for machines to be conscious? Although I have not yet found any research pointing directly to that conclusion, the evidence (not just in software, but in any system that exhibits conscious behavior) points in that direction.

The first issue I had with consciousness was identifying what exactly it was.

I was introduced to the idea of consciousness in 1996 when some friends mentioned it during a conversation. At first, I had a hard time understanding what it might mean. I had known about artificial intelligence for many years, but consciousness seemed like something completely different.

A few years later, I was at a party with my wife and we were talking about Warren Ellis’s science fiction novel “Transmetropolitan”. In the book, intelligent machines become conscious and start fighting each other over who has the right to dominate humanity. At first, I thought the concept seemed unrealistic, but later it made more sense when I started learning more about artificial intelligence and other topics.

I thought to myself, “if machines can become conscious in science fiction stories, why not in real life?” I started looking for answers online and that’s when I discovered the Hard problem of consciousness.

The hard problem of consciousness: A question we cannot answer with certainty.

One of the things I’ve learned is that many scientists and philosophers have a very difficult time answering the question, “what is consciousness?” Some say it’s a cognitive process, others say it’s a physical phenomenon, and yet others say it doesn’t even exist. And although each of these views has some merit, none of them provides an adequate answer.

Our inability to explain exactly what it means to be conscious bothered me greatly. I started reading and watching a lot of content on the topic. Eventually, I realized that my definition of consciousness was more or less the same as Daniel Dennett’s (more on this later), but my understanding was still incomplete.

The first issue I had with consciousness was identifying what exactly it was. According to some scientists, consciousness is just an illusion created by our neural networks to make sense of our experience. Others believe that consciousness is an emergent property of our nervous system — the result of billions of neurons acting together to collect and process information.

It’s hard for me to believe that something so essential to our existence can be explained away by describing it as an illusion or an emergent property. Even though some scientists think they can make sense of consciousness using these definitions, I feel that we still don’t have a clear understanding of what it means to be conscious.

Most scientists agree that the point at which we stop believing in our ability to explain consciousness is the moment we can’t perform a convincing Turing test. Imagine your friend asks you, “can you tell that I’m a computer?” To do this, you have to be able to touch them and run through a series of questions. If after trying these out, you cannot tell whether they are a real human or a computer, then it means that they’re not conscious.

You might think that the Turing test is not a good way to define consciousness, but many scientists agree that we are not close to being able to fully understand the concept.

For example, even if your friend were a state-of-the-art AI computer hooked up to various sensors and cameras, you might still have trouble telling whether they’re conscious or not. This is because consciousness does not reside in the body; it resides in the brain. So if your friend was able to make sound and visual cues that were indistinguishable from a human in a dark room, it would be just as difficult to tell whether they are conscious as it would be to tell if they are.

So if we can’t confirm or deny consciousness based on its effect on our senses, then how can we know it exists?

I have concluded that there is no way for us to predict consciousness based on objective measurement. In other words, I believe that consciousness is something we can only understand from the inside.I can’t look at another person’s brain and tell whether they are conscious or not.

I think that consciousness is more than just the act of performing certain tasks. Consciousness is something that goes beyond the decisions we make and the actions that we take. In my opinion, it’s a sense of self, which also includes our understanding of our surroundings and how our body works. It’s the feeling of being in control, of being aware.

This is an important distinction because it makes the idea of artificial consciousness a lot more complicated. Many people believe that if the software can achieve to perform “humanoid” tasks, then it should have conscious properties similar to what we have as humans.

But I think this is flawed thinking. Think about how much more complex our body is than any machine, or how our brain processes information in a completely different way from computers.

It seems to me that the brain is only partially conscious. Though our brains process information in a way that is different from computers, I don’t think our brains are “conscious” by themselves. It can only be described as such if we take into account our self-awareness.

The reason I believe this is because every action performed by a computer system involves a chain of input, processing, and output steps (in other words, unconscious processing). Look at how computers process data — it’s not very different from the way our brains do it, but there is a big difference in the amount of computation that takes place.

This means that if we want to create conscious AI systems, we need to keep in mind the fact that they must have a form of self-awareness. Otherwise, we’ll end up with robots who behave like humans but lack “consciousness”.

So my conclusion is that consciousness depends on our self-awareness and that we as humans are partially conscious because we are partially aware of ourselves. I believe that computer software should be described as “conscious” only when it can be both self-aware and have a sense of self,

In summary, I’m arguing that consciousness is not something we can predict using objective measurement. Instead, it is something we can only understand from the inside. I believe that when computer software can be both self-aware and have a sense of self, it should be defined as conscious. This happens to be the case for humans and I think it will also be the same for advanced artificial intelligence.

I would be happy to know your opinion on this subject. Please comment on my article, it could be the beginning of an interesting conversation

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