Will AI ever = conciousness or sentience?

[Angrboda]

This question has two, more or less equally important halves. The question as posed is largely incoherent, postulating capabilities of human minds that are so poorly defined as to compete with contemporary theology for emptiness, and much of the capability that is vaguely alluded to hasn't, in the manner described, even been shown to be possessed by human brains or minds.

So the first half of answering the OP is clearing away all the bullshit, folk psychology, unsubstantiated metaphysical kruft and new agey whackadoo that infects the question as posed. Do you have an actual entity with known properties that you are asking to be duplicated, or are you asking whether God can create a rock that he cannot lift? I think your OP leans strongly toward the latter.

Having just this past month put the last major brush strokes on my own theory of mind and brain, I have my own conclusions about such questions, unfortunately much of that thinking is still on the shelf marked "proprietary." In philosophy of mind discussions, the types of properties of mind which the OP and others allude to, I often refer to simply as "special sauce," ala the McDonald's Big Mac, whose "special sauce" was considered an essential contributor to the sandwich's unique appeal. Consciousness and similar effects of minds or brains is often put in the role of the special sauce, that we have a thinking machine, but we also have this something extra which makes the operation of the human mind categorically different from other machines (and incidentally, different from all or at least some other animals, which poses innumerable difficulties given the nature of biological evolution). I've yet to see a good, workable definition of either consciousness or this special sauce in general, but if the OP will provide it, I may oblige with a more substantive response.

For my part, my belief and my theory is that there is no special sauce. Once you remove the questionable assertion that this special sauce exists with the magical properties frequently attributed to it (such as the degree of self-referentiality referred to above), the business of explaining the human mind becomes much more tractable (and in my view, more realistic). So, in a nutshell, yes, we might be able to recreate a mind like that which humans possess. The only obstacles being the practical and political ones which face any technological project. The brain, excluding extra-brain contributions to mind, consists of 100 billion neurons (1) (in addition to other cells and biological materials; the role of glial cells is coming to be appreciated to be much greater than previously surmised, and a human without a body and functioning endocrine system would hardly be human). And we still understand its operation largely piecemeal and by inference. We do not yet have a Darwin of brain science who has proposed a plausible unifying theory. (A saying in neuroscience is that, "neurons which fire together, wire together; neurons that fire apart, wire apart"; this rather stochastic feature of brain development likely underlies the topological layout of things like tactile sensation in the cortical tissues, which mirrors that of the physical tissue in its layout; a hand neuron will fire more often, more closely in time to a forearm neuron than it will a toe neuron, and thus ends up being wired more closely to it; this principle likely has dramatic implications for the nature and function of our brain systems, but as yet, it's difficult to extend it beyond a few isolated modalities.)

So what we lack is twofold. A proper understanding of the question. And the actual answer to the question.

There is a hidden question here that bears voicing. Even if we could create a mind which operates in the same manner as the human mind does, would we want to be limited to that pattern? The preference matching algorithm at Amazon.com is an example of modern machine intelligence. It performs its function supremely well, yet beyond basic principles of operation, we have no clue as to the specifics of how it does what it does. They created the basic form of its intelligence, and turned it loose to grow and learn and perform. What is lacking in the machine mind of the Amazon.com preference machine that you would want to add to it, from the capability of the human mind, speaking specifically of those things that you suspect the human mind uniquely capable, or that you believe is not duplicable?

In the interest of clarity, I will simply state that I do not believe in either free will or consciousness as popularly described. I know whateverist and I differ on the former, so there may be some aspects of the question here which may be fundamentally irreconcilable. And I suggest we don't go down that route: there are free will discussions aplenty. It might be useful though, to simply shelve that question, and address the question on account of what remains.

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