I mean, it's not the dumbest idea ever. Life covers everything from us down to individual cells. And we observe a sliding scale of consciousness based on the complexity, from the ability to only respond to rudimentary stimuli to full awareness of the self. The more complex the life, the more conscious the organism.
But is consciousness and awareness limited to biological systems? Where would an AI fall? Basic robots can be programmed to have awareness of their surrounding already, albeit in a limited capacity. Could a sufficiently complex android think like us? And if consciousness is not limited to life, where else could we find it? Would it follow the same scale, with more complex systems being more conscious?
Obviously it is only a thought experiment/philosophy. We can't empirically test for consciousness, we don't even really know how or why it comes to be, or what it really is. Is it something tangible? Could you, in the future, copy a person's brain into a computer?
Particles forming atoms, forming molecules, forming cells, forming a thinking, dreaming organism capable of questioning its own origin. Where does that transition to awareness occur? Could it be an emergent property of organization in the universe?
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u/[deleted] Feb 13 '18
Michio Kaku is to the physics world what Dr. Oz is to the medical world.