Can computers become conscious?: My reply to Roger Penrose
My initial thought about this is to reformulate the question as: &quot;Can humans become conscious?&quot;. I don&#x27;t think most people would claim that sperm and egg cells are concious. I also don&#x27;t expect many people to argue that all humans come from joining these two, non-concious elements. Most (but maybe not all!) would probably agree that that embryo, consisting of a handful of cells, is not concious.<p>Yet, we interact with people all the time, and at least some of those we consider to be concious. So, <i>by definition</i> the answer to the question is yes. But I think that exploring <i>why</i> that is so, can also shed some light on what we mean by &quot;being concious&quot;, how one might demonstrate that something is (or isn&#x27;t) concious -- and how much of being concious relates to being able to relate to other that we consider to be concious as well.<p>If we could (and was willing) to raise a child without <i>any</i> human contact, what would such a thing become? Would it really become something we would call human? Concious?<p>I think that going down this line of questioning, we&#x27;ll find some ideas about emergent systems, part-whole relations and in general a lot of complexity.<p>I think it also hard to claim that if we can merge a sperm and egg cell, and create a new concious system, that we couldn&#x27;t be able to create some artificial (meaning, constructed by us, not &quot;found&quot; in nature) system that develops into being concious.<p>INMHO, the controversy isn&#x27;t if an artificial construct can become concious, but what conciousness is, and how we know it&#x27;s there.