This is the sort of question that has come up for me a lot as a religious person surrounded mostly by engineers. At one time I dated a roboticist.
It was his belief that if we continue to develop computers to be more and more like the human brain, we will eventually have a robot who is effectively human.
But what about consciousness?
To him, if the machine could imitate consciousness, then it was conscious. I was not so sure.
Talking about this question with my current guy, he had an interesting way to look at it. He pointed out that I believe that consciousness is one thing that permeates all of reality. His thought was that it is one consciousness everywhere, but there are certain places in which it pools. One of the places that consciousness pools is within individual human beings.
A robot in that theory could be developed to do the same thing. If so, it doesn't feel nearly as sacrilegious as the "building consciousness into a machine" did to me.
But is consciousness the same thing as a soul?
It was his belief that if we continue to develop computers to be more and more like the human brain, we will eventually have a robot who is effectively human.
But what about consciousness?
To him, if the machine could imitate consciousness, then it was conscious. I was not so sure.
Talking about this question with my current guy, he had an interesting way to look at it. He pointed out that I believe that consciousness is one thing that permeates all of reality. His thought was that it is one consciousness everywhere, but there are certain places in which it pools. One of the places that consciousness pools is within individual human beings.
A robot in that theory could be developed to do the same thing. If so, it doesn't feel nearly as sacrilegious as the "building consciousness into a machine" did to me.
But is consciousness the same thing as a soul?
I'd agree with that, again coming from a scientific perspective. In Hinduism you see souls moving into animals and plants, why not into a robot?
ReplyDelete