Do you think machine consciousness is possible?
extension: Imagine a scientifically minded human being from 500 years ago encountering a present day computer, complete with software, internet access, the whole bundle. If asked to speculate on how the computer worked, being a person of science, they would have to admit that they didn't know. But pressed to form some sort of model of it's inner workings, they would likely come up with some fairly simple explanation centered around one all-important aspect or another: a single magical power of some sort that is the basis for everything mysterious about the computer. He would be very unlikely to imagine that countless layers and dimensions of technology needed to come together to make the computer possible.This tendency towards oversimplifying the unknown seems to be fundamental to the way we think and it runs through the history of human speculation. Consistently, our beautifully unified theories about gods and ether and magic are replaced by the messy, complicated realities of physics, math and biology.One of these beautiful unified theories which we are having a particularly hard time letting go of is the idea of "consciousness", alleged to be a single remarkable quality of some sort which is both essential and unique to the mind. That vague description is as close as you will come to a consensus on the definition of consciousness, and it still won't please everybody. Despite there being no agreement on what the word actually means, nearly everyone is nonetheless quite sure that whatever it is does exist and needs explaining.In the time when the brain was utterly baffling, before we knew about neurons or brain anatomy, the model of the mind based around consciousness was at least reasonable. But now we know essentially how neurons work, how they can grow into complex useful systems, and the staggering quantity of them that make up a single mind. We have managed to isolate many aspects of human thought to particular areas of the brain. We've observed people functioning without certain fundamental faculties when parts of their brain are damaged, faculties which we would have intuitively considered indivisible from the mind as a whole, but which we are now forced to consider handy peripherals which we could do without, if need be.As the gap between our intuitive understanding of the mind and our scientific understanding grows ever smaller, as we explain one faculty after another, cleaving them from the plausible kernel of the mind, and as the operative definition of "consciousness" continues to vary wildly from one navel gazing philosophy major to another, sharing nothing in common but the spelling, its career as a thought provoking topic of conversation nears its end, to be followed by its retirement to a quaint artifact of our ignorant past.