Human Consciousness

The question of what consciousness is or what we can deem as to be conscious is most fiercely debated topic in this dissertation because its subjective nature; what you and I may consider to have its own consciousness may possibly or rather probably will be different, how then can we build a machine with its own conscience when we has humans still haven’t figured it what it even really means to be conscious.

I think therefore I am

This very famous statement written by French mathematician and philosopher Rene Descartes in part IV of ‘discourse on the method’ in 1637 is one of the cornerstones in understanding much of modern, western philosophy as it is fundamentally is a response to his writings Pillar of philosophy. The relevancy of his …show more content…
So then it begs the question if humans are made up cells and have a central processing unit called the brain, and equivalently computers are made of silicon and also have CPU, why can humans be consciousness but machines not. Well, one of the main arguments suggested by many and in particular pointed out by celebrated computer scientist and leading figure in robotics research Selmer Bringsjord in his book ‘what robots can and can’t be’ is that computers as of now computers just simply cannot process that incredible amounts of raw data required to fully be aware, compared to the brain the chips of today are simply no match and therefore may require a system such a quantum computing to drastically change this. The views on this notion however are quite conflicting and thus has sparked up another debate as it is too difficult to truly calculate the amount a human brain actually processes in each second as it relies on many factors that rely on mathematics and neuroscience to agree upon such as how many synapse’ fire of each second, how much data they carry and which rate they carry these information, this culminates in an extremely unreliable figure which has been suggested to be no more than …show more content…
Firstly the question of machine intelligence vs machine consciousness; one of the major talking pints of this debate was a chess match held in 1997 when for one of the first times a machine was able to best world chess Grandmaster, Gary Kasparov, as he was defeated by IBM’s ‘Deep Blue’. The oxford dictionary claims consciousness to be ‘the state of being aware of and responsive to one 's surroundings’, well in this case the computer was definitely responsive to the moves made by Kasparov, out of millions and millions of chess moves to consider and calculate the computer chose the correct moves for the most part; considering there are more chess positions in a single game then there are atoms in the observable universe making chess one of the most complicated games to solve in computing; this milestone that the computer was somehow able to win was highly celebrated and to some showed the first signs of true machine intelligence as it played strategic, however in my reckoning it does not sure this at all because the system itself and the programming of the machine is solely dedicated to solving and choosing the best moves specifically for chess, as too further differentiate the differences between machine intelligence vs machine consciousness it is said that many of Kasparov’s opponents are intimated