Hi,
I've studied a little bit of Artificial intelligence and what i've come to understand is that Humans are an abstraction of God and what we are trying to do is make Robots an abstraction of humans.... We can emulate the human behavior and psychology into a robot..... if we achieve this and to certain level we have, does it mean that robots too have consciousness similar to us. Can robots, in future, seek God??????
—Could Robots have consciousness???, India
The short answer is, No. The rest of my answer is an excerpt from Swami Kriyananda’s new book of essays, Religion in the New Age:
To be a complete human being means to realize one’ s own full potential as a child of God. Until then, one is still only a sort of robot, functioning with varying degrees of efficiency, but unable, as yet, to go beyond merely functioning …
The question is sometimes asked: ‘Will computers someday exceed human intelligence?’ If it comes to specific problem-solving, why not? Computers are designed to spare man the effort of lengthy and tedious ratiocination. … The intellect is only, in any case, what we might call an ‘ electronic mechanism.’ It has nothing to do with actual awareness. Logic is not what lifts man above the animals. It is the much greater clarity of human awareness …. As for the emotions, it would be out of the question. Feeling cannot be ‘programmed,’ for it is an essential aspect of consciousness itself.
People don’ t seem to understand that consciousness is a more basic reality than rational intelligence — more basic, and also more transcendent. Consciousness is our central reality. It cannot be defined: It can only be perceived. That perception, moreover, is intuitive, not rational. Descartes said, ‘ I think, therefore I am.’ He was quite wrong! He should have said, ‘ I am’ ‘ or perhaps better, ‘ I am conscious of being, and therefore I am able to think.’
