The Problem of Consciousness

Many movies like Bicentennial Man and more recently WALL-E all have machines that some how develop a consciousness but that is just that, these are movies intended to get people to spend ten dollars for an escape of reality. Because these machines with consciousness will never become reality, no matter how good an imitation is it will just be an imitation.

John Searle was right, consciousness is something that cannot be invented. It is something that is unique to humans and is something created biologically not through computer technology. The act of conversation, used in the Turing test as proof of consciousness is not enough. Conversation is basically just the exchange of knowledge or information, how does this prove something has consciousness. Consciousness in this article is defined as the state of "sentience or awareness that begin when one awakes in the morning from a dreamless sleep and continue throughout the day until one goes to sleep at night or falls into a coma, or dies, or otherwise becomes, as one would say, `unconscious'". So how could be ever prove that a machines truly recognizes any of these requirement. I believe that we cannot, everything that a computer "knows" is programmed being programmed is different than experiencing life, attaining knowledge and feeling sensations. We know when we are conscious because we experience these things but a computer never can, because it is a machine.