It thinks... therefore...

Published on E&T magazine of IET by Chris Edwards

Research into machine consciousness is leading engineers to re-evaluate the relevance of philosophy, discovers Chris Edwards. Inventor Ray Kurzweil has a dream. And he intends to live to see it. He claims he takes a daily cocktail of pills to help make sure he is around to witness the creation of the first artificial brain: something he reckons will happen by the end of the 2020s. One of Kurzweil’s hopes is that this will make it possible to cheat death: we could upload our consciousness into the machine and remain conscious just as long as the computer receives power and maintenance. But the prospect raises a conundrum: would that machine actually be conscious? Would it think? How would we know? Even if it told us it could see and feel, would we believe it? Or would we consider it no more than a simulation of consciousness, where the lights are on but nobody is home? Questions like these are leading engineers to consider whether it is time for the discipline to merge with philosophy, as engineering by itself will be unable to provide the answers. Philosophy as such still struggles with the questions. We don’t really know what intelligence is and whether consciousness is effectively synonymous with it. But the quest to uncover consciousness in an artificial entity may provide clues that classic philosophical introspection has not managed to uncover. Click for more...