Machines and Consciousness

During our discussion of whether machines can ever have consciousness several people referenced an entities ability to pursue its own free will. Frank Sudia, a San Francisco-based e-commerce security consultant, presents a different point of view saying that machines will never "be" as we are. He says, "The ability to make and act on one or more choices out of multiple options, and the ability to decide which of thousands of possibilities is the best one to use in an unforeseen situation, may be a basic, working definition of what it means to "be."

"If the machine has the power of self-production -- if it can seek its own goals or even pick its own goals from some list of goals it reads about in the newspaper [and decides], 'Oh, I want to look like Madonna,' -- I think that this ability to choose, guided however it might be, is indistinguishable from what we consider to be our sense of self."