Self Consciousness Issues Essay Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 250 words

Self Consciousness Issues - Essay Example The first question is based on the understanding that the level of memory humans rely upon to recall early events in life operates from about the age of three or four years old. Prior to that, the hippocampus and prefrontal cortex are not fully developed (Mastin, 2010). If this question, then, is asked of a human, their earliest memory is unlikely to be a recollection from before age three or four. An artificial intelligence machine, however, has working memory activated immediately upon being turned on. I reason that a machine will answer this question with literally their first experience and not with a later one. The second question assumes that machines with artificial intelligence do not experience altered states of consciousness, and therefore do not dream. I suspect they would not be able to describe a dream that would fool me into thinking they are human. I pay attention to my dreams and the dreams of other people, and I have noticed that describing a dream is done in a diffe rent narrative style than describing an ordinary awareness event. Dreams are often fragmentary, have confused chronology, incorporate magically changing imagery, are usually symbolic, may be vague upon recall. Furthermore, AI machines do not experience emotion, so fear would be a foreign experience to them. Even if the machine has been programmed to articulate emotional expression, what a machine would find â€Å"frightening† would no doubt be qualitatively distinct from what a human finds frightening.