Conscious experience: the most difficult problem to address in the science of the mind. As David Chalmers puts it, “There is nothing that we know more intimately than conscious experience, but there is nothing that is harder to explain.” Philosophers have been taking stabs at an explanation of the “hard problem” of conscious experience for thousands of years, yet the problem persists.
And now, at the dawn of the “age of intelligence,” we are faced with a new and exciting, but potentially troubling issue: as our machines get more and more intelligent, is there any chance that they may become conscious? They can already do so many things at levels that are currently humanly impossible; could a conscious race of machines make human life inconsequential? A favorite topic of SciFi authors and film directors for decades, AI takeover is now quickly transitioning from a distant fantasy to a very real, very tangible possibility. But will it ever be possible? Is it conceivable for a machine to become a conscious being? Some think it’s a laughable concept, one deserving of little attention or thought; others are devoting their lives to trying to make it happen. Who’s right? Will all efforts at AI consciousness be in vain? I will be exploring these questions through a new lens, looking beyond philosophy. If AI consciousness is ever to be, it will arrive as the sublime amalgamation of quantum and neural sciences, heavily-influenced by computer science: a biological computer.
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