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2. Consciousness in Machines
In Artificial Intelligence (AI) there is a general tendency to
consider that information processing in the brain causes intelligent human
behavior, and that such information processing can be simulated in a computer and hence produce
intelligent behavior artificially. In a computer, information at the processor
level is processed by on/off switches. In a digital computer the two
binary digits 1 and 0 could correspond
to the 'on' and 'off switches. Hence digital computers are designed to process
data using binary digits. In AI there is an assumption that "the brain
processes information in discrete
operations by way of some biological equivalent of on/off switches"[l].
They also tend to view mind, "as a device operating on bits of information
according to formal rules" [2].John
von Neumann, one of the inventors of the modern digital computer, commented,
"The available evidence, though scanty and inadequate, rather tends to
indicate that the human nervous system
uses different principles and procedures (than the digital methods and
processes)" [3]. According to Hubert Dreyfus, "The difference between
the "strongly interactive" nature of brain organization and the non-interactive
character of machine organization suggests that so far as arguments from biology
are relevant, the evidence is against the possibility of using digital computers to produce intelligence" [4].
At the Artificial Intelligence laboratory of MIT, the creation of
Cog, the 'most humanoid' robot, was attempted under the direction of Professors
Rodney Brooks, Lynn Stein and Daniel Dennett. Cog had two human size arms and two eyes, each
equipped with both a foveal high-resolution vision area and a low-resolution
wide-angle parafoveal vision area. "The computer-complex that has been built to serve as the development
platform for Cog's artificial nervous system consists of four back planes, each
with 16 nodes; each node is basically a Mac-II computer - a 68332 processor with a megabyte of RAM. In other
words, you can think of Cog's brain as roughly equivalent to sixty-four Mac-IIs
yoked in a custom parallel architecture" [5]. Cog is designed for
face recognition. When different faces
are produced before it, Cog is supposed to 'recognize' the familiar faces and
develop its own worldviews of faces. Current research at MIT is aimed at
designing and fabricating a humanoid
face. There are also future plans to design lips, ears, eyebrows, etc.In
artificial intelligence, efforts are made to endow human intelligence to
computer programs. Efforts are also made
in Robotics to make intelligent machines. Human intelligence has the exclusive
characteristics of intentionality, understanding and other subjective
qualities. The effort to endow
subjective qualities in machines raises serious interest in the study of
consciousness.