An Aristotelian Theory Of Consciousness - 1646 Words

The idea of creating a synthetic consciousness has fascinated the human imagination for many a century. These range from the ancient Pygmalion’s Galatea, the mythological golem, Victorian automatons, to our more recent fancies- computers, robots and other Turing machines. Perhaps the reason for this preoccupation with artificial intelligence is actually a quest to better understand our own consciousness. At first sight, the question â€Å"Can a machine be conscious?† appears deceptively simple. However, the answer to this question is entirely dependent on how we define consciousness. We can embark by defining consciousness in an Aristotelian fashion- by its function. Generally philosophers use the term â€Å"consciousness† mainly to describe†¦show more content†¦If we can only observe the behavior of others objectively, how can we be certain that they are conscious? Everyone around us could just as easily be a philosophical zombie, with all the functions and responses of a conscious being, but with no understanding or awareness of their responses. Thus, a metaphysical solipsist could very easily say that discussing whether a machine can be conscious or not is obsolete, because the concept holds no existence in anything but our own mind. The Turing test is a method conceived by Allan Turing to determine whether a mind is conscious. Supposing we create a machine that has been programmed to responds in the exact way that humans do. In the Turing test, both the machine and a human are asked the same questions. A person listening to their answers without knowing which of them was responding each time has to discern which answers are given by the machine. His premise is that if the answers of the machine and the human are indistinguishable, there would be no difference between machine and human in terms of consciousness. However, the Turing test only determines whether we think a machine is conscious by its superficial behaviors, and does not determine whether it is actually conscious Furthermore, we have no evidence that the human we are comparing the machine to in the test is conscious either- the Turing test only measures computational ability. Similarly, a neural activity scan could