In the Star Trek: The Next Generation episode “The Measure of a Man,” Captain Picard asks a scientist wishing to dissemble commander Data to prove to him that he is conscious. The fact that the scientist cannot demonstrate something that appears so obvious is exactly Picard’s point — if a robot could think in all the ways that we do, would it not have the same feeling of “I”?
In my latest Because Science, we take a look at how the problem of consciousness is tackled by the new film Chappie. Because Chappie is not just an intelligent robot, it’s a thinking and feeling robot, the movie deals directly with what philosophers call “The Hard Problem of Consciousness.” In other words, how can a bundle of neurons have an inner life seperate from just sensing and responding to information from the outside world? Spoiler alert: we don’t know, but something just like a Chappie could help us understand why.
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The concept of “I” is a “point of reference” issue. From the moment you are born, you only see life from your perspective so your brain interprets itself as an endpoint and send point for data. As a single point in the chain of data, that in of itself gives the concept of individuality that the brain interprets as “I”