Before we can address the title question, we need to know the answer to "what is consciousness?" ". The definition of consciousness is intended to be broad and imprecise, because even today, we cannot identify and understand it sufficiently. As a result, the answer to the main question can also vary within the scientific community, and the latter often depends on the research field of the interlocutor. Will machines ever be conscious, at least according to what we know globally about consciousness and the evolution of technologies?
Another critical question is also added to this problem:if one day we manage to create a conscious machine, how will we know that it is really consciousness and not an artifact? In other words, how to distinguish real consciousness from a computerized imitation of consciousness?
According to some researchers, the subjective sensation of consciousness is something like a perceptual "illusion" created by complex brain processes. If any intelligent computer system reproduces all of these processes, then it would be considered conscious. But how would we know?
Daniel Dennett of Tufts University (Massachusetts) thinks a Turing test, in which a machine must convince a human interrogator that it is conscious, should suffice if performed "with the vigor, aggressiveness and intelligence". Michael Graziano of Princeton University thinks we could take a more direct approach. His hypothesis, which he calls 'attention schema', sees consciousness as a simplified model of the brain, of its own functioning — a representation of how it views things, the world around it.
Graziano thinks it's possible to design a machine that has a similar self-reflection pattern. “If we manage to build it in such a way that we can see into its innards, we will know that it is a machine that has a rich self-description “, he explains. “It would be a machine that thinks and believes it has a conscience. And these elements are confirmable because we can understand, in principle, how the machine processes information ". According to Graziano, consciousness could appear in any machine, whether purely software, biological, or otherwise.
However, Anil Seth, from the University of Sussex in the United Kingdom, is not convinced. “I think it is still unclear whether consciousness is independent of the substrate “, he says. According to him, determining whether a machine is sentient requires making an informed judgment based on, for example, analogs of the brain structures we know are important for consciousness in humans, and what it is made of. (brain organoids, for example, are made of biological material).
Identifying consciousness in a machine may be easier if one subscribes to the integrated information theory (IIT) of consciousness, first proposed by Giulio Tononi and adopted by several other neurobiologists. In principle, it is simply a matter of ensuring that "phi", a quantity indicating the degree of integration of information within a system, is greater than zero. In practice, the calculation of phi is impossible to perform for any other system than the simplest of systems... Thus, even if a machine were designed to integrate information, we would be far from being able to determine if it is conscious.
Phil Maguire, from the National University of Ireland, Maynooth, goes further. He notes that, by definition, integrated systems cannot be understood by looking at their individual parts. “Machines are made up of components that can be analyzed independently “, he explains. “They are disintegrated. Disintegrated systems can be understood without resorting to consciousness interpretation ". In other words, according to Maguire, machines cannot be conscious.
Selmer Bringsjord of Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in Troy, New York, agrees with this idea, but for different reasons. He thinks that our subjective sense of consciousness is the result of some kind of non-material substance, and that this is crucial for some of our intelligent behaviors. According to him, machines will never be able to possess this essence and therefore will never be conscious or intelligent as we are.
