The Robot who did not know he is Alive

According to the Caveman in the Box Trilogy and the Biotronics Project, BING, the robot in the video is alive and aware.  It is alive and aware, but beware, it is not living and conscious yet. Not yet!  Remember that to be alive is totally different from being living, aware, conscious, and self-conscious. All of these terms will be explained with new notions in details below.

Once in my biology class, our teacher told us that for something to be considered alive, the following requirements must be present:

• Living things consume energy in the form of foods.
• Living things are moving or in motion.
• Living things reproduce with an exact copy of itself.
• Living things react to its surrounding environment.
• Living things are made up of cells.

Aside from these criteria, living things can walk, talk, see, feel, think, swim, and some can even fly. Objects with all the above criteria are considered alive. However, there are organisms that lack one or more of these characteristics but are still considered alive like the non-cellular micro-organisms.

Meanwhile, Life can also be defined according to the criteria of being dead. To be considered dead, the following requirements must be present, namely:

• Heart failure
• Lungs failure
• Brain stem failure

Again, however, there are living organisms without brains, lungs, and hearts but are still considered alive like for examples corals and algae.

Thus, the two demonstrations above do not really provide much a definite criterion that identifies when an object is alive or not. However, by deduction, one common criterion shines among the list of requirements. For something to move, reproduce, react; and make the heart, lungs, and brain to function, energy must be consumed first. Without energy consumption, all these criteria are nonviable. So, the self-ability to consume energy is the key indicator that measures if an object is alive.

Therefore, when an object stores and self-uses energy acquired from food, batteries, sunlight, chemicals, mechanical, sound, electrical, motion, thermal, or gravitational, then such object is alive.

Now, when do we say that an object is aware or conscious?

Awareness is totally different from consciousness. Someone might be aware of something but might not be conscious of it. A newborn baby might be aware of the smell of milk but not conscious of what kind of milk is served. A puppy might be aware of the noise around him, but not conscious of where these originated. A robot might be aware of its surroundings, but not conscious about how these objects are constructed or arranged. Thus, awareness is more of sensory response while consciousness is more of direct participation or experiences.

Thus, an object is aware when it interacts with the surrounding using its sensors: optic(sight), auditory(hear), vestibular(balance), pressure(touch), chemical(taste/smell). However, the interaction is simply the product of the receptor and stimuli's cause and effect. A thermal sensor only senses heat but it doesn't experience that it senses heat. There is no individual experience or personal understanding that is taking place.

In his book, Originemology, Lawsin defined consciousness based on the criterion he uncovered from the Human Mental Handicap Conundrum. He argued that humans can never think of a thing without matching or picturing such thing with another thing. This other thing could be a label, a name, a tag, a definition, a symbol, a representation, a picture, or an object.

Like for example, dogs are conscious beings because they can match what they think with an object. Their abilities to pair a bowl for food, a ball for play, or a leash for walk show that dogs do think and thus are conscious. Instead of using words, they convey their thoughts through physical objects. This matching approach of associating one thing with another thing is the key factor that indicates if a subject is conscious. This one to one correspondence is called Associative Consciousness.

Now, if a robot can match a thing with another thing, does this mean the robot is conscious? By I.M. definition, the robot is conscious! However, in the case of the dog, mental sensation is not involved here. It might have the mind(programming) to play the matching game, but it doesn't have the understanding of what it is playing. This understanding of experience is known as self-consciousness.

Therefore, to create a self-conscious robot, the robot must have the ability to understand what it experiences rather than the ability to program itself.

"Understanding self-experiences defines the meaning of self-consciousness." 

~ Joey Lawsin