Justin Blanton | Can machines be conscious?

I practice IP law in Silicon Valley and have an unhealthy obsession with coding, photography, Apple, gadgets, artificial intelligence, and all things Internet.

More than anything, this space is an outlet for sharing and commenting on things I'm currently involved in, infatuated with, or annoyed by, and it just so happens that a lot of those things have to do with computers.

Twitter: grinning, and bearing. it's what i do. 3 hrs ago

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Can machines be conscious?

What are the essential properties of consciousness, those without which there is no experience whatsoever?

We think the answer to that question has to do with the amount of integrated information that an organism, or a machine, can generate.

[...]

To be conscious, then, you need to be a single integrated entity with a large repertoire of states. Let’s take this one step further: your level of consciousness has to do with how much integrated information you can generate. That’s why you have a higher level of consciousness than a tree frog or a supercomputer.