Well, I think that, not being a very mainstream-spiritual person, our awareness is really just how we interpret data that we get through our sensory input (sight, hearing, touch, taste, smell). We don't know something if we have never seen it before, and we can become confused about something and have other people think we are doing things right. For example:

What if there was a man who was color-mixed-up. He saw all colors backwards, so where a normal person sees red, he sees green, and where a normal person sees white, he sees black. Now, if this were true, because we define color in terms of what we see, not in terms of a verbal definition ( just try and put what a color is into words!), he could play "I spy" with a normal person and be as effective at it as they are, even though he is seeing all the trees in a shade of red.

Because of this, when a computer, for example, is told that "a chair is a type of furniture", it can "know" this as well as we do, because even if we went on to tell it that furniture is a kind of fruit, the same would happen to a human if told the same thing ( assuming that this is a young person inexperianced with english). Also, we recognize objects by visual patters - a chair has about four legs, you can sit in it, its usually made of wood, etc. If the computer had an excellent sight/speech recognizer that let it recognize characteristics and correlate them with words - like seeing a curly piece of hair and recognizing similarities with a curly piece of wire, if programmed to use those results well, it could acheive as good a simulation of intelligence as we have.

After all, if I kept you locked in a box for twenty years, then brought you out and told you that the sun is purple and Barney is gold, you would believe me.

red 	625-740 nm 	480-405 THzorange 	590-625 nm 	510-480 THzyellow  565-590 nm 	530-510 THzgreen 	500-565 nm 	600-530 THzcyan 	485-500 nm 	620-600 THzblue 	440-485 nm 	680-620 THzviolet 	380-440 nm 	790-680 THz

Theres a little bit of overlap. So greenish blue would close to 500nm.

From,
Nice coder

Wasn't there a program a few years back that learned via "IS-A, HAS-A, IS-RELATED-TO, OPPOSITE-OFF" and all that kind of relationships, which eventually asked "What am I ?".

Although probably this program was also given a hardcoded amount of abilities...

Does anyone remember?

Edo

Well, what ilverphyre673 sais is true I think... at least, if we would know what the truth is. Luckily, most humans think the same about most things, like the sky is blue, rain makes you wet, a bang on your head hurts etcetera. But the truth is a relative thing. Just because our brains work in a certain way, we think coffee smells good and 2x4==8 (I'm sorry for those who disagree, but you get the point). But when someones brains are set up differently (we call it mental ill), his/her truth might be very different. You can't blame him, its just the way he sees things.

But again, I don't think it has anything to do with awareness as brains are jus a tool to do stuff. We thinkg awareness is to 'reqognize' the world and events around us, like somebody calls your name. Its (too) difficult but a pc good be programmed to be aware as well with stuff like voice detection, sight reqognition and a large memory to store happenings. But does that make a computer 'aware'? In my eyes, its still just a machine, an intelligent one though. Awareness is some kind of feeling that you really exists, or as spiritual persons may say, a soul. No matter how smart a machine gets, it wouldn't be 'alive' until that soul thing (whatever that might be) is implemented.

well, obviously the brain is a _MUCH_ better processing tool than a computer is. Nature has been working on us for like 10,000 years, we've had computers for about 50. :) In addition, VERY little has been done so far to give computers visual or audio capabilities, much less smell or touch. This makes a big difference, as it limits the amount of learning a computer can do to text, for the most part. But it can do this fairly well, especially when simulating what (we think) the brain works like.

Also, emotions and feelings (pain/love/fear - all those) stem from electronic pulses from nerve to nerve, and are interpreted by the brain. In theory, if your brain were really screwed up, you could interpret pain as pleasure. But nature has designed us (for good reason) to interpret it negatively, so we don't kill ourselves.

All in all, I think natural selection has such a force of time, in addition to a very effective and objective way of judging which of a crop is the best and improving it, that there is no other way to go about developing a "life-like", emotional, pattern-recognizing AI. They aren't the only way to go, though. In many situations, it would make more sense to use some other kind of AI that is more specialized to a certain application.

This may generate flames, but in my opinion, the way to go with this highly experimental and theoretical AI would be a genetic algorithm + ANN, both the best ever invented. It may never be achieved. Why don't more n00bs ask about how to make one of these :) ??