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How would you know if something is "simulating consciousness"?

• Animats 12y ago
  Exactly. "Philosophy is the discipline in which you kick up a lot of dust and then complain you can't see" - attributed to Leibniz. People were fussing over this issue long before the 1994 paper mentioned. Aristotle fussed over it; he was trying to pontificate on what makes humans different from animals. He decided it was the ability to do arithmetic. We now know that arithmetic is, in an absolute sense, one of the easiest things to build out of logic elements. The big practical problem in AI is not "consciousness", but "common sense", the ability to predict what's probably going to happen from an act and deciding whether or not to do it. After we solve that problem and are able to build robots that can get through a day of diverse tasks without help, we can look at consciousness again. As a practical matter, it's useful to view "consciousness" as a background task with the job of adjusting the parameters used to formulate sequences of actions. Humans can't figure out how consciousness works by introspection because brains don't have enough internal access to their own processing. Other methods will be necessary, and we don't have the analysis tools yet.