Machine Awareness

Now that I can no longer carry intent from one room to the next, I find a new interest. I am overwhelmed by Consciousness, even more by Self-Consciousness, and extremely so when imagining Artificial or Machine Consciousness [AC or MC]. Pain, Pleasure, and an internal display of the surrounding environment, seem to be basic requisites. It would seem impossible to find a way to program pain in a machine. Basically, sensing pain is used by a system to avoid serious damage and even failure of the system. Pain is sensed at the location of the infliction, but requires input to the brain for the sensation to be realized. This brings forth the question of ‘caring’ … perhaps implying a desire for existence and for pleasure. So how would a machine be made to care if it becomes damaged? To ‘feel’ hurt? OK. For now, skip pain. How are we most aware of our own consciousness? In All the Light We Cannot See,  Anthony Doerr writes on p408  So how does the brain, which lives without a spark of light, build for us a world full of light?  There is evidence that this visual display occurs in an area of the visual cortex,V1, where, if non-functioning due to damage, etc., people with blindsight still can sense objects and motion, but cannot ‘see’ them. We can certainly give a device blindsight! Present day video cameras record both a visual and an audible stream and, indeed, do tasks such as detecting faces, but it is not clear how to use such data to implement machine awareness. Overwhelming! So. Pick one care and devise a device that responds to that care. Well, CPUs are already programed to sense their operating temperature and to activate a cooling fan when needed.  Is this primitive awareness? Most certainly not.  The CPU doesn’t care if it burns up, its owner does. The automobile is a machine that has many correlates with living entities.  It requires fuel to work, it has a carburetor which inhales air, it has a fuel pump to circulate fuel and a radiator to provide cooling for the engine and warmth for the cabin, radio and phones for communication, and sonar and radar to allow guidance and the avoidance of external objects. Even so it is certainly not conscious. So, why would we need a machine with awareness? Perhaps to finally understand our own.