Will Machines Ever Be Conscious?

Photo by Alex Knight on Unsplash

This topic is of particular interest to me because I’m an engineer working in the field of artificial intelligence, I have a Ph.D. in clinical psychology, and I have a lot of experience with meditation and in various branches of Eastern and Western philosophy.

There has been a lot of debate in various fields about what consciousness actually is and what causes it, debate in which there seems to be very little consensus. So far, we have been unable to accurately define consciousness, let alone find its root cause. Yet we all know what “consciousness” means: it is the sense of being a separate individual who experiences the world; there is a body and a brain, but there also seems to be a “me” that is somehow inside the body looking out, a “me” that is experiencing what is happening.

Some religions refer to this as the “soul” or “atman.” Some spiritual traditions and philosophers suggest that there is a meta-consciousness that is expressing through each individual, that God (or a piece of God) is looking out through all the eyes. This metaphysical view of consciousness, as a kind of “ghost in the machine” idea, is what drives the argument that we cannot make conscious machines. How can we construct a vessel that can contain a soul when we are not “The Creator”? This philosophical position, that consciousness is the fundamental nature of reality, is called…