Are You consciously aware ?

There are thousands of software engineers across the globe working day and night to create cyberconsciousness. This is real intelligent design. There are great financial awards available to the people who can make game avatars respond as curiously as people. Even vaster wealth awaits the programming teams that create personal digital assistants with the conscientiousness, and hence consciousness, of a perfect slave. How can we know that all of this hacking will produce consciousness? This takes us to what is known as the “hard problem” and “easy problem” of consciousness. The “hard problem” is how do the web of molecules we call neurons give rise to subjective feelings or qualia (the “redness of red”)? The alternative “easy problem” of consciousness is how electrons racing along neurochemistry can result in complex simulations of “concrete and mortar” (and flesh and blood) reality? Or how metaphysical thoughts arise from physical matter? Basically, both the hard and the easy problems of consciousness come down to this: how is it that brains give rise to thoughts (‘easy’ problem), especially about immeasurable things (‘hard’ problem), but other parts of bodies do not? If these hard and easy questions can be answered for brain waves running on molecules, then it remains only to ask whether the answers are different for software code running on integrated circuits. Read on... this blog