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Revision as of 19:15, 13 March 2004 by Psb777 (talk | contribs) (say why you do not like it on the Talk page if you revert)(diff) ← Previous revision | Latest revision (diff) | Newer revision → (diff)An artificial consciousness (AC) system is an artefact capable of achieving verifiable aspects of consciousness.
Becuase of controversy over what consciousness is the definition of that is deliberately left to the Misplaced Pages article Consciousness where these attributes of psychological consciousness are both listed and defined:
- spatialization
- analog I
- analog Me
- excerption
- conciliation
- narratization
As a field of study, artificial consciousness includes research aiming to create and study such systems in order to understand corresponding natural mechanisms.
The field of artificial consciousness is controversial. Some deny it is possible at all or possible without the existence of strong AI, which is itself said, by some, to be impossible. Another area of contention is which subset of possible aspects of consciousness must be verifiably present before a device would be deemed conscious. One view is that all aspects of consciousness (whatever they are) must be present before a device passes. An obvious problem with that point of view, which could nevertheless be correct, is that some functioning human beings might then not be judged conscious by the same comprehensive tests.
Examples of artificial consciousness from literature and movies are:
- Vanamonde in Arthur C. Clarke's The City and the Stars
- Jane in Orson Scott Card's Speaker for the Dead
- Xenocide
- Children of the Mind
- The Investment Counselor
- HAL in 2001 A Space Odyssey
- R2-D2 in Star Wars
- C-3PO in Star Wars
Professor Igor Aleksander of Imperial College, London, stated in his book Impossible Minds (IC Press 1996) that the principles for creating a conscious machine already existed but that it would take forty years to train a machine to understand language. This is a controversial statement, given that artificial consciousness is thought by most observers to require strong AI. Some people deny the very possibility of strong AI; whether or not they are correct, certainly no artificial intelligence of this type has yet been created.