Where does consciousness come from?
speek: It depends on who you ask, but there are two general camps: the bottom-up approach and the top-down approach (neuroscience and psychology, respectfully).I believe it to be a side product of response to stimulus (neurons firing off). If I'm right, we're going to have a lot of fun with interfaces in the next 20 or so years. I'm a big believer in emergent neuropsychology (the functional programming version of brain science).I'm not going to delve into the top-down approach because you get a lot of other really cool theories, but a lot of it has to to with perception ("Is this red the same color to me as it is to you (other than just naming this color red)?").In response to your edit, I'm pretty sure that neurons start firing before birth but neurons are interconnected in a multi-dimensional graph, so it's pretty much a chain reaction that gets influenced depending on external (or internal) stimulus.I believe that when we take both the bottom-up and the top-down approach and meet in the middle, we will have a true AI... but I'm guessing it'll be based on a non-vonNeumann architecture.