[E. Pluribus Unum]

I personally believe that consciousness is a quantum mechanical phenomenon, and I don't think we are anywhere near understanding enough quantum mechanics to make a computer conscious of anything.

[Big Red Badger]

Blows My Mind !

[Enlightened1]

Stanley Kubrick was way ahead of his time.

For a very long time, like most people, I did not really understand his movies like 2001 Space Odyssey (meaning the ending), A Clock Work Orange, Eyes Wide Shut and Apocalypse Now. I mean I understood it the way most Americans and not the deeper meaning.

However, I view his films as genius today.

[Donald Rumsfeld Fan]

HAL COMPUTER

HAL COMPUTER

[glorgau]

For some light reading: Consciousness as a State of Matter by Max Tegmark.

[Boogieman]

“Hal is a machine. Hal is programmed (or misprogrammed) to block the mission, to destroy it, to destroy Bowman, who as it turns out, is on a voyage to greater consciousness.”

No, Hal wasn’t programmed to sabotage the mission. He was programmed to ensure the completion of the mission, at any cost. In fact, he was the only one on the ship that knew all the details of the mission, because the flight crew was not trusted with the most classified information. He decided, based on his logic and programming, that the humans must be unreliable and a threat to the completion of the mission. So, he did what seemed to him to be the logical thing and tried to eliminate the threat.

[LonePalm]

While Mr. Rappoport may well correct in his assertion that machines will never attain sentience.

That doesn't mean that it isn't an extremely useful literary tool for examining what it means to be human.

Consider the differing treatment of Machine Intelligence in:
Isaac Asimov's I, Robot, et. al.,
Philip K. Dick's Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? aka Blade Runner,
Frank Herbert's Dune,
Robert Heinlein's The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress,
the Japanese Manga series Ghost in the Shell, etc.

The meaning of machine sentience is a significant part of the SF novel I am finishing up.

"Ceterum censeo 0bama esse delendam."

Garde la Foi, mes amis! Nous nous sommes les sauveurs de la République! Maintenant et Toujours!
(Keep the Faith, my friends! We are the saviors of the Republic! Now and Forever!)
LonePalm, le Républicain du verre cassé (The Broken Glass Republican)

[Enlightened1]

“he 10 Most Insane Direction Decisions by Stanley Kubrick”

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yyt6aFI_sfA

[I want the USA back]

Finally, someone who is not afraid to say what I think.

[fuzzylogic]

So what happens when you have multiple large neural networks all interconnected? What will it do?

...nobody knows. We just know neural networks learn, we just can’t follow the complexity.

This is separate than having a soul but I’m not sure that being self-aware is impossible.

[gundog]

Go back and watch Stanley Kubrick’s Clockwork Orange, if you can handle it.

Handle it? It's practically a comedy.

[nightlight7]

These are opinions as much as any other on the subject since present science has no model for consciousness. There is no equation or natural law containing consciousness as a quantity. Nothing in science can tell which arrangements of atoms, molecules or fields are conscious.

All we have are people handwaving their little tales, like the one the above.

[TheRightGuy]

Colossus: The Forbin Project