OK, good, so we have in common that we both believe qualia exist. I didn't get that from your preceding posts. "What we shouldn't do, is say humans have qualia

OK, good, so we have in common that we both believe qualia exist. I didn't get that from your preceding posts. "What we shouldn't do, is say humans have qualia and jump to the conclusion that machines can't have qualia, and can't be "aware" in the same sense a human can be. I apologize if that wasn't your intended argument." No, we can't make that jump. But my intuition as a programmer (and one who is interested in A.I. and does A.I. in the sense that some of my mathematical ideas were incorporated into a number of spam filter products) is that they don't. There is simply nothing there that would "add" awareness to the algorithm. All there is is information processing. It can classify something as either having the attribute of yellowness or not. But something beyond that functionality is required to have it experience the qualia of yellowness. My point is that we have no idea what that something extra is. Somehow, people have it. But we don't know how. There are hypotheses, like those of Roger Penrose who discuss quantum phenomena as possibly being behind it, as made manifest in certain microscope structures in the brain. Suppose Penrose is right. Then, maybe one day a quantum computer can incorporate the same phenomena and be conscious for the same reasons we are. But I do not believe that, for example, a spam filter as we know it today has the slightest experience of qualia. There is just no "room" for it. Everything in the spam filter has a specific function for the classification task and has nothing to do with experiencing qualia. The same is true for the most complicated deep learning network. Maybe software as we know it can induce qualia as some kind of an emergent phenomenon, and the brain also induces it through some kind of emergent phenomenon. But I tend to hypothesize there would be something that causes that, some mechanism that the emergent phenomenon grows out of, that is not embodied in something like a current-day deep learning network. My hypothesis is that to create a machine that experiences qualia, we will first understand the mechanism behind our own experience of qualia, and then reproduce that mechanism in a machine. I hypothesize that this would be a new and extremely fundamental, and transforming, scientific discovery. And if we do reproduce that mechanism in a machine, and THEN that machine passes the Turing Test without us programming mechanisms to merely MIMIC human behavior, then I'll tend to assume that we've created a truly conscious entity -- though we may never be able to completely prove it. On the other hand, there's no reason to assume we'll ever discover how it works -- for instance, we can't rule out the idea that there is a God who doles out souls to human bodies, and that we'll never have the means to understand God or souls. I don't believe that's the case -- but plenty of people do, and we can't presently prove they're wrong.