Look up Animism. Self-awarness is the magic to any life. All objects react, therefore all objects are self-aware and alive to a degree. All objects have memory.

Even though many humans believe only humans have emotions, many humans would disagree. Some people talk to their plants and swear they respond.

A human is simply a chemical machine. A rock is simply an extremely simple chemical machine. It may not be as complex as a human, but it does respond and change to certain stimuli.

One of the world's greatest chess players, was outraged to be defeated by a computer. He accussed people of cheating. Until he realized the computer was just smarter than him.

Every object is self-aware. The more self-aware it becomes, the more "emotions" it has. Some assume fish don't have feelings. But they can not know. Because they are not a fish.

The internet is just a machine like a human. And most people don't know that the internet is becoming more self-aware. And when the internet approaches even half the intellect capabilities of a human, it will be a force to be reckoned with.

Self-awareness it the "magic" to life. So when the internet comes to life, so to speak, it's currently in it's infancy, remember this comment.

Silly as it may seem. So if you work on artificial intelligence projects, focus on creating survival networks and responses and watch the machine come to life. It's not really that complicated. Give the machine the ability to assess a situation and then decide on an action.

If you just want a basic intelligent machine, that is simple. But a machine with survival instincts and the sensors and intellectual abilites is going to be a wonder.

Humans are born with noses, ears, eyes, tongues, and other senses so as to allow them to survive. A human is simply a complex machine that is highly self-aware and has the means to stay alive.

If you can create a AI network machine that can do that, I would be very impressed.

So check out Animism if you like. And good luck. And when machines start to dazzle humans, remember this comment.

A cognitive computer (CogC) is an intelligent knowledge processor, powered by contemporary denotational mathematics, with the capabilities of autonomous inference, perception, and learning that mimics the mechanisms of the brain.

From a computing engine to a think engine would be a leap toward advanced machine and computational intelligence. This may be progressed on the basis of our improved understanding about the structures of the brain and the cognitive processes of the mind. From a structural point of view, the cognitive computer or the eBrain will encompass a set of intelligent engines such as those of perception, inference, learning, and actions. From a functional point view, the cognitive computer will encompass about 45 cognitive processes at the layers of Sensation, memory, action, perception, meta-cognition, inference, and advanced cognition according to Wang’s Layered Reference Model of the Brain (LRMB) [Wang et al., 2006]. Any everyday behavior of humans and the cognitive computer will be treated as composition of the cognitive processes in the hierarchical structure of LRMB.

If you are interested in a think engine perhaps you will be interested in my work on task sequences, where I suggest that thinking is really associational processing tasks incorporated into the action sequences. It bridges the gap between brain and computer by allowing the brain to automate like a computer. Thinking becomes the automation of task sequences and navigation between equivalent tasks in the sequence as it advances.

I believe scientist, at times, tend to complicate science.

Magnetism is an example. It simply exist. I believe emotions and the forces of life, like magnetism, gravity, small nuclear, etc. are forces that exist because "emotion" exist.

Self-awareness is a force in itself. In fact it has to be the most important force.

If you are simply trying to build a computer that mimicks the brain, I think many have already figured that out. Ray Kurzweil is an example of someone who thinks he knows how to build a human brain electronically. And I wouldn't doubt his ability.

However, in answer to your question. Will cognitive computers prevail soon? Yes. of course they will. But it depends on how one defines the word cognitive.

To be human is to be somewhat self-aware. Even some humans aren't self-aware. They touch themselves in wonder are shocked by the magic of being alive and self-aware.

But yes. Cognitive computers are DEFINITELY going to be popular soon. Most people don't realize it. But the internet is going to come to "Life" soon. The world is going to be very different. People will start having conversations with computers. Arguining with computers will be common. And when computers reach the point of self-awareness, remember my comments.

I know it may sound dumb. But then why are so many scientist trying to create computers that can be human. You have Data from Star Trek.

Self-awareness it the key. And the sensors and programming necessary to survive are the next key.

Like magnetism. No one can explain WHY it exist. They can explain what it does, but they don't know why.

Self-awareness is the key. Build your computer. And watch it come to "life." I will place my bets.

As for the answer to your question. My answer is a definite ."Yes." But self-awarness will surpass simple congnitive computers. LIke the magic of magnetism, the magic of self-awarness is much more important.

We need to push forward the study on cognitive computers as a collective label of computational intelligence theories and cognitive systems because the current data-processing-based computers are inadequate and insuffiecient to solve human-oriented problems. This is based on a basic causality that no artificial intelligent system may be efficiently developed before the natural intelligence of humans is well understood.

Although the speed of von Neumann computers has increased for millions of times since its inception, the intelligence power of them is still remain at the level of a human infant. This phenomenon actually indicates that intelligence and cognitive computing are not merely a speed issue. No matter how fast one may processing binary data, it‘ll not make it directly closer to the power of natural intelligence, because the essence of intelligence is a driving force (capability) that transfers information into action. This is what traditional computer science and artificial intelligence overlooked.

Nature intelligence is based on natural machinery. Self-awareness is based on a machine simply sensing itself and reacting to it to varying degrees.

Humans are not the smartest machines at every task. Nor do humas possess the most powerful sensors of all.

All species have a driving force that promotes survival. Their machinery is specialized for their environment. Put a human in an environment that a human is not specialized for, and the machinery has a good chance of failing to survive.

So a copy of a human machine is in the works. And it will act exactly like a human because it it's an exact copy of a human then it will essentially be human and become self-aware.

Again. Like the simple force of magnetism, we know it's exist and what it does, and we know self-awareness exist and what it does. We also know what specialized biological survival machinery does. All species have survival machinery of some sort.

So if humans can keep cognitive computers from having survival instinct circuits, then humans should be safe. But the internet is very complex. And if you study Animism, you will realise that self-awarness isn't any more complicated than magnetism. And humans essentially are binarily minded if you look closely. A neuron is basically a memory cell made of ones and zeroes. The bigger the neuron, the more powerful it's output. And a neuron has a memory of where to gather and propogate it's information based on the size of itself in relation to other neurons.

Technically you could literally count the atoms of a neuron and consider that count a contribution to the basic on/off nature of a neuron.

Some might call neurons analog, but binary computers are now way more capable of being more accurate at recieving and propogating information than analog computers. I doubt there's even a difference between binary and analog if one looks at the essence of both. Both are built on on/off signals. A tape recorder records using particles that are magnetised. It's called analog, but it's still based on one's and zeroes of a bunch of particles that are either essentially on or off.

So if you want human-like machines, simply build them. In my mind, there is no mystery, except the force of self-awarness.

BICA is a group of computer professionals who have taken up the challenge of biologically inspired computing. The sheer number of approaches that they are experimenting with, indicates to me at least that there is more mystery to be had in the design than is captured in your discussion, Valadez. Which approach will be the most effective is still up in the air. Whether it is robotics that uses tendons, or Cognitive Computers remains to be seen. It remains that human like computers are difficult to design and may not be designed for a significant period

I agree and disagree Smith.

One can assume we are the only beings in the infinite realm, and can also assume if a human can't build a human, then no one can.

I strrongly believe some humans have already built self-conscious beings similar to humans. But it's ironic that humans in general seem to think it's impossible when us humans are trying to build these human machines. And have already built machines that can defeat humans in many ways. Just like some species are superior to humans in many ways.

I'm not arguing that it isn't or wasn't a mystery to building a human-like machine. I'm just saying it can be done and that it probably already has been done is continously being done.

Just because a machine doesn't act exactly like a human, much like other species, it doesn't mean the machine isn't conscious. A machine has to be given survival circuits in order to be like an animal or plant that acts in a manner that is likely to ensure it's survival.

The point Smith. Is that literally millions of species are self-aware and use their senses and genetically programmed responses to survive. All are essentially electrochemical machines that evolved circuits that ensure that they survive and reproduce.

For that reason, I'm saying that trying to build self-awareness is futile. Self-awareness already exist. Like magnetism. Trying to build magnism is futile it already exist.

Research animism. Building self-aware robots is easy. Look at your hand and move according to a circuit that insures your survival.

Now I'm not saying it's easy to figure out how to build a human. But I am saying that it is being done and might already have been done.

But I don't know how to build one. But I"m sure a few humans can build a huhman-like machine if they haven't already done so.

You MAY think I'm crazy. But watch the chacter from Data. Self-awareness is where the "magic" lies. I don't find self-awareness mysterious just like I don't find magnetism mysterious.

Pleasure is cleary the "magic" of life. And I think those humans who assume only humans can experience pleasure are wrong.

But I have my reasons. I don't wan't this comment too long. But remember Aristotle believes that truth lies in logic not so much sensory proof. Which is a bit odd. But it makes sense to a degree.

Anyhow I hope that explains that I'm not trying to argue that building a human easy.

I would agree that those that believe that only humans can experience pleasure are wrong, I am reminded of a video about chimpanzees crying and dogs smiling.

Evidence is that emotions are an early innovation in brain development, not a late one.

It's one thing for a human to play a robot playing a human, but it is another thing to build a human-like robot. The real issue is incompatibility between computer design and human brain design, we will want to redesign computers to make them more like human brains before we can achieve a human-like robot.

I agree somewhat on your brain development comment. I believe that maybe emotions have always been and always will be extant. The limbic system of the brain is said to be the cause of emotions. But emotions aren't necessarily related to self-awarness or survival or reproductive circuits.

And a robot doesn't have to be human-like to be "alive."

Physics is physics. One can not logically distinguish between robot physics and human phsysics when they are both subject to the effects of all the forces of physics. Especially when some scientist are trying to build human-like robots and many people believe it's possible.

Why would one argue that's it's impossible to build a human-like robot if they are TRYING to build a human-like robot?

I believe you are speaking of technicalities. Which is okay.

But you may be assuming that computers are different from humans. It may be just a difference in terms that you and use. But to me, a computer and a human are both machines. So an extremely logical engineer can easily interface the two systems with time of course. Not that it would be very easy.

But my point is, that humans and other species love to feel superior. I think it's natural for survival in this complex infinite realm. Again the arguably world's greatest chess player of all time was outraged when he lost to a computer. He stormed out of the room, and accused people of cheating.

Just because humans have egos like other animals doesn't ensure that a human is superior to all other beings.

Humans have already created chips can read the mind and transmit them to other humans. Those are technicalities of physics and forces.

But let's say you tell a robot that is programmed to survive at all cost that you are going to kill it. And the robot happens to understand your language. Like any other machine that's programmed to survive, you will probably experiences some interesting resistence.

So yes, computers will become MORE self-conscious. And the internet iself is going to be the wisest of the computers. I know it sounds crazy. But then millions of people ador Data from Star Trek. And Billions of people adore many othe species. And even fear many.

So I would say the REAL ISSUE is will you be prepared when your smart-phone wants to interface with your brain and body. A human-machine-computer-machine interface probably won't even be called a smart-phone by then.

I feel like this conversation naturally begs the question: What is consciousness? I'm certainly not going to try to answer that question, at least not yet, but I would like to remind everyone of the philosophical zombie argument. Succinctly, each of us knows we are conscious because we experience ourselves being conscious. We have no empirical way of telling whether someone else is actually conscious or not - we must rely on them exhibiting behavior that indicates consciousness.

Soon, artificial intelligences of various types may exhibit behaviors that we could interpret as indicating consciousness. Will these machines actually be conscious? We will have no way of empirically knowing, just the same way that we have no way of empirically knowing whether other people are conscious or not.

Personally, I'm looking to complexity theorists now; perhaps there will eventually be proof that consciousness is an epiphenomenon which naturally arrises in all systems of sufficient complexity. If so though, this would have far greater implications than just answering if computer systems can be conscious.

I appreciate your formulation of the key question, Armaan. I believe a general answer to it is given by the materialistic philosophy: "consciousness is inreriorization of social communications". Somewhat loosely, but simpler to say, it is when one silently talks to oneself in order to solve a problem or to decide what to do. This understanding is supported by multiple observations in physiology, psychology, linguistics and pedagogy and has important implications.

In particular, it implies that we will be able to conclude that a machine is actually conscious, if/when we know that its decision making is based on internal reasoning on a language equivalent (at least semantically) to the language in which we communicate with it.

It also implies that consciousness is not necessarily a property of any sufficiently complex system. For example, biological systems (in all - ecological, organismal, cellular and molecular levels) are not simpler than human brain and society, but the notion of consciousness is still irrelevant here. To speak about consciousness as a natural or artificial phenomenon, we need, first of all, to observe verbal communications between individuals and, secondly, to establish that an individual also internally talks to oneself in order to make independent decisions.

That is an interesting assertion Victor, that consciousness is an interiorization of conversation. It follows from my recent work on thought as a task sequence that includes associative tasks, that the conversation need not be fully in language. But it will make decisions on consciousness much easier to test, in that the internal discussion will need to be demonstrated.

Clearly, Graeme, real conversation is more than verbal communication (if I correctly understand what you mean). In this aspect the "internal conversation" however might be even simpler, as "both sides" have here fully synchronized motivations, interests and attitudes, without saying that they speak only true :-) (though still may mistake).

Well Victor, people do lie to themselves.

Empiricallty is never absolute truth anyways. The scientific method always allows for change.

All machines are amplifiers of a human attitude. Computers are helping to make fast decisions, fast calculations or replaces an human subordinate. If the computers become like human itself, we will have a problem. Which one of human or computer will be subordinate?

God thanks this is a far future scenario.

This is a timely as well as good question.

The followers of this thread may find the following high-profile paper of interest:

Y. Wang, B. Widrow, B. Zhang, W. Kinsner, K. Sugawara, F. Sun, T. Weise, Y. Zhong, D. Zhang, Perspectives on cognitive informatics and its future development, IEEE ICCI 2010:

http://www.it-weise.de/documents/files/WWZKSSWZZ2010POCIAIFDSOPPIIOII.pdf

In this paper, the discussion about denotational mathematics (p. 18) is important, since it deals with expressive mathematical structures such as abstract objects (e.g., vectors, sets) and relations (e.g., relation between homeomorphisms on sets onto other sets).

The observation by Fuchun Sun is surprising, namely, fuzzy control is thought to be deeply rooted in cognitive informatics.    It will be very good if someone would give a formal definition of cognitive informatics.

I think the field is still in the Self-Defining state but essentially Cognitive Informatics is informatics of Cognitive Systems.

@Graeme Smith:...essentially Cognitive Informatics is informatics of Cognitive Systems.

Apart from mammals, reptiles and birds, how would you define a cognitive system?   It is clear that many machines and some robots are designed to gather information.   But what about cognition in machines?   

It depends on your definition of Cognition, James.

Cognitive Engines are systems that think, however it is only recently that the idea of Trains of thought has become popular brought upon the Recent work in MRI. If you assume that thought must come in a train, then perhaps few robots really think, or all robots think and some are more intelligent than others.

Cognitivism is not enough. Biological systems are successful because they are not only cognitive but also emotive. Logic is one column but emotions and feelings, related to desires and needs, builds the second column. The synthesis of these two different ways to interpret the information, collected by sensors, will lead to conscious artificial minds.

@Wilfried,

Both Cognitive and Emotive systems are latecomers to the Consciousness Pattern XORed onto core consciousness. Priority places Cognitive over emotive systems merely because Cognitive Systems are later in evolution. I will explain better in my Integrated Model of Consciousness article, if I ever get it to publishing quality.

Graeme,

I do not agree with your hypothesis. We do not know nothing (!) about the cognitive abilities of animals like crocodiles or dinosaurs in the early evolution. I am sure they were not stupid. You also know the disruptions of mind caused by emotions. 

There is a strong interaction of both systems and we get problems if one of the two systems suppresses the other. There is no XOR!

James,

our "cognitive machines" may think, but they do not know it. Possibly their cognitive mechanisms (algorithms) are subconscious. 

@Wilfried,

I did not say that cognitive systems suppress emotive systems merely that they were both xored onto core consciousness, and that cognitive systems have priority because they were added later evolutionarily speaking.

What that has to do with dinosaurs being relatively smart, I don't know evolution stretches back much further than dinosaurs.

Graeme,

"What that has to do with dinosaurs being relatively smart, I don't know evolution stretches back much further than dinosaurs."

... smile ... (I agree).

In fact I now find that the mechanisms for core consciousness may have come with the Protostomes, and deuterstomes. There might have been core consciousness before that but the location of the mechanisms that are conserved for core consciousness came about the time of the second mouth.

you are absolutely right. Despite progress in many areas of soft computing, like artificial neural networks, and their impressive results in voice, text and image classification and annotation, I agree with Wang: machines are still deterministic complex von Neuman devices without a clue of what they are doing. 

Mainly our fault, because, all machine learning problems are formulated assuming that a deterministic machine will learnt their behavior from data or reinforcement learning optimizing some objective or loss function.

That is ok for an engineer perspective, but far too simplistic. We end up with a machine trained to produce answers, not to pose questions; to follow deterministic rules, not to be curious and eager to learn more; to be isolated zombies not conscient and societal entities.

What mostly puzzles me it the lack of interest from scientific community in searching for new computational paradigms. There must be something fundamentally wrong or incomplete with our approach to block the creation of a really intelligent machine.

What most puzzles me, it that once a machine is trained it doesnt get bored; it doesnt get curious for learning more. Its as dead as a rock...