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More About Consciouseness.

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Posted by Alexander on July 5, 2001 22:46:45 UTC

Depending on definition of consciouseness, we (humans) are just a biological machines (one possible extreme), or any reasonably complicated computer is a conscious being (another one).

And actually it is not very significant what kind of complexity of system or what kind of performance you call consciouseness - you will almost ALWAYS find slightly less or more performing machine or biological system, so regardless what definition of consciouseness you decided to come up with, there is no qualitative (really distinct) difference between conscious and non-conscious systems - only quantitative (complexity).

Just consider evolution of a brain (say, from insect to human) and tell me when it became conscious - when it had 1 neuron, 10, 10^5 or 10^10 ?

Or when AI system becomes conscious? If you tempted to say: never - think again. Learning databases and various flexible expert systems are already self-modyfying and are approaching self-programming capabilities, so "self-awareness" as a distinctive feature of a consciouseness may soon be shared by a computer systems too.

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