Can machines ever be conscious?
We will probably never know as we do not know what consciousness is.
It can not be defined scientifically. How will we possibly answer any question involving that?
Intelligent calculations based on what some humans instructed and stored in a machine mimicking living beings are not any more conscious than its predecessors of course. Functionally the same thing. if it is conscious, it was conscious and if it is not, it was not.
> we do not know what consciousness is. It can not be defined scientifically
There is an unsubstantiated leap from the first statement to the second. We do not understand consciousness sufficiently to say it’s not real to the point of being immeasurable. Because if it is, for all practical purposes, it doesn’t exist.
If any computer today is conscious (or can become so), then any Turing computer ever made is also conscious and always could have become so.
The fundamental operations burned into the silicon in your Casio pocket calculator from 1974 are no different from the ones available on the cloud computers that power LLMs. All those operations are known in advance and designed by people. They are products of man's consciousness, but cannot ever attain self-awareness or volition.
