

IEEE Spectrum: Can Machines Be Conscious? - njrc
http://www.spectrum.ieee.org/jun08/6278

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rjprins
Sigh, you first need to define consciousness before you can answer any
questions about it. What is consciousness? My dream is to develop artificial
intelligence, so I've thought about this a lot. Generally people have it very
wrong.

I would define it in two parts:

1\. Consciousness of facts: What you "know" is what you are conscious of.
Machines are already conscious because they have memory.

2\. Meta-consciousness: You know that you know, or you know what you know.
This is a feedback loop on knowledge, unlimited in recursion. Sort of like the
check if a pointer is null (and a check if the check is null, etc.).

I know hardly anybody agrees with this, but I'm pretty serious about it.
People tend to confuse what they see as the world with what any entity should
see. To make computer more _human_ , is to create human senses, simulate human
techniques of interpretation and memory and add a comparable experience of
time.

But in my eyes there is no reason not to claim that computers are already
conscious. Consciousness just isn't the goal.

~~~
joe_the_user
Indeed,

Consciousness might not have anything to do with intelligence as such or the
human brain. It might just be a muddled cultural remnant of Western philosophy
or a glitch in the endocrine system or an artifact of our language or
something else.

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Allocator2008
This article was pretty vague on what it meant by integrated intelligence as
the criterion for consciousness. For example it was not even clear to me as to
whether or not linear separability was a requirement of their "integrated
intelligence system", i.e., whether a conscious system should be able to solve
linear separable problems. Using a term like "integrated intelligence" does
not say what, specifically, needs to be integrated.

