[lux]

You know, there's this thing called the Chinese Room Argument. Basically, imagine a room with no windows and a locked door. There's a letter box in the door; that's about it. Inside the room there's a Chinese woman with a pen and paper. She also has a book that translates English to Chinese. So every now and then, a letter comes through the letterbox with some English on it. "Hello, how are you?", it might say. She opens her book and she matches up the squiggles and figures out which squiggles to draw to reply to the question. "I'm fine. And how are you?", she writes. She manages to conduct a conversation without knowing a word of English or even knowing what she said. All of her intelligence, her conscience came from some rules in a book.

We don't understand consciousness, so we cannot recreate it. We can make another room with a more advanced book, but we cannot create true AI.

At least not yet.

But, we can imitate consciousness.

When one reads enough books, they'll be able to author their own.

When we get to a stage where a machine can take apart these theoretical books, and what goes in to creating them, and re-create it's own original content, we have imitated consciousness.