Mar 29
What Is Consciousness?
Can robots have it?
There’s much fuss about consciousness nowdays, because of Ai and all that stuff: influent people, scientists keep saying that robots are conscious or will become in the near future, the famous singularity that once reached, it’s impossible to distinguish an artificial intelligence from a human one. There’s much confusion about consciousness because no one knows what it really is: that’s why they think a robot can become conscious, because they don’t know what they’re talking about. Only when you don’t know a property of a subject, you can assign that characteristic to everything. For a blind man, anything could be red, as long as he’s concerned. Consciousness is the faculty of becoming aware of anything, consciousness is awareness. Perceptions, thoughts and emotions, that’s what we’re aware of in a lifetime, these are the constituents of the experience we call life. Now, is cosciousness derived from the brain, or is it prior to it? The latter is correct. Because the emerging property theory of consciousness doesn’t make sense at all: if I add things, quantity, to my system, I will never have a property that is aware of the system, quality, thus it’s outside of it. It’s like saying that a well constructed universe could create God, the only entity that is aware of the entire universe. That’s the idea most scientists have today, unfortunately. Of course, this idea is fallacious, a bunch of circuits will never have consciousness, it will do more calculation, sure, but consciousness would be the awareness behind those calculation, another plane of existence, unreachable for simple matter. Am I a theist than? Yes, I am. Because that’s the world view that makes more sense to me. From chaos can’t be created a perfectly calculated mathematical universe, it just can’t. Said so, I’m not part of any particular religion, I don’t think that God punishes us if we’re bad children, I believe in free will. A person is responsible for his actions, or rather his unconscious, but that’s another question. Now, I hope that you followed my thread of thoughts until now, for any clarification feel free to write down here your perplexities or critics, have a good existence!
