On Monday, 8 July 2013 at 21:46:24 UTC, Walter Bright wrote:
I'm sure you're self-aware, as I'm sure Siri and Watson are not.
But there is no way for you to prove to me that you are self-aware. It could be that you are simply programmed to appear to be self-aware; think of an infinite loop containing a massive switch statement, where each case represents a different situation in life and the function to execute in each case represents what you did in that situation in life. As long as we can't test whether and entity is self-aware or not, for our purposes, it kind of doesn't matter whether it is or not.
If we ever are able to define what consciousness is (and I'm quite sure we will), I suspect it's going to be some kind of a continuous feedback loop from sensory data to brain, and from brain to muscles and through them back to sensory data again. Consciousness would be kind of your ability to predict what kind of sensory data would be likely to be produced if you sent a certain set of signals to your muscles.
I like this guy's take on consciousness: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3jBUtKYRxnA
