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The idea of a thinking machine is an amazing one. It would be like humans creating artificial life, only more impressive because we would be creating consciousness. Or would we ? It's tempting to think that a machine that could think would think like us. But a bit of reflection shows that's not an inevitable conclusion.
To begin with, we'd better be clear about what we mean by "think". A comparison with human thinking might be intuitive, but what about animal thinking? Does a chimpanzee think? Does a crow? Does an octopus ?
The philosopher Thomas Nagel said that there was "something that it is like" to have conscious experiences. There's something that it is like to see the colour red, or to go water skiing. We are more than just our brain states.
Could there ever be "something that it's like" to be a thinking machine? In an imagined conversation with the first intelligent machine, a human might ask "Are you conscious?", to which it might reply, "How would I know?".
http://theconversation.com/what-does-it-mean-to-think-and-could-a-machine-ever-do-it-51316
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(Score: 3, Insightful) by acid andy on Friday January 08 2016, @01:15PM
I broadly agree with your points. I agree with you that we cannot prove that no superior consciousness exists. I think we probably can't prove it does exist either, with any of the information currently available. Never mind superior, it's a struggle to prove that human consciousness exists. We just have to accept our own individual consciousness sort of axiomatically.
The philosopher David Chalmers would say yes to this. I like the idea myself as well.
Intuitively, to me, consciousness feels like a sort of restrictive bubble of experience. A single point of view at an instant in space and time. It feels like, in one given instant, I am me and I have access only to the memories of this one particular brain, at this one particular moment. A nanosecond ago I might not have been conscious, or I might have experienced another brain's thoughts and sensations. The important thing is that I am conscious of this one brain's state precisely due to restrictions in connectivity. I have access to information stored in various parts of this brain because there are physical connections between those parts. It's difficult to imagine a planet or the universe having the same kind of vivid conscious experience because the parts of it seem less directly connected - but maybe I'm looking for the connections in the wrong way.
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