BUILD A BRAIN CORTEX
ENTER THE WORLD OF A LIVING BRAIN CORTEX MACHINE - PART 1
Follow along as we build a real living electric brain cortex, a machine using Parallax Propeller chip processors and artificial intelligence software.
In a human, the cerebral cortex plays a key role in memory, attention, perceptual awareness, thought, language, and consciousness.
— the most mysterious project ever imagined at the Lab? —
ARTIFICIAL GRAY MATTER
In this machine, the cortex will have primary functions that include memory, language, thinking, asking questions, volunteering information, carrying on a conversation in natural language, and learning. It will be aware that a human is talking to it, with its single minded limited form of consciousness.
MATCHING ELEMENTS OF
HUMAN AND MACHINE CORTEX
HUMAN MACHINE
Memory X
Attention X
Awareness X
Thought X
Language X
Consciousness X
1) The machine cortex is aware of information it is taught. It remembers information in its memory. When a teacher talks to the cortex, it has attention span. One can converse with it in native English language. The cortex is aware of an external object, i.e. a human when the human talks to it, therefore by definition it has a limited consciousness.
CORTEX TALK - IT WILL LISTEN & LEARN
The machine cortex will live forever in a sealed jar and the objective will be creating a living autonomous entity with immortality that has some level of all the mentioned elements contained by a human cortex.
INDEPENDENT CORTEX
The machine Cortex will have its own environment with a full degree of living independence. Inside its hermetically sealed brain jar, it will have all the luxuries of a cortex home. This includes a resident bed frame, air, unlimited source of food energy, and a kind of telephone for talking to humans.
This means it will have the method to function autonomously, alive on its own while having some assistance for rare maintenance when parts begin to wear out and need replacing. For all practical means, the cortex is immortal.
Consciousness is the quality or state of being aware of an external object or something within oneself. It has been defined as: sentience, awareness, subjectivity, the ability to experience or to feel, wakefulness, having a sense of selfhood, and the executive control system of the mind. Despite the difficulty in definition, many philosophers believe that there is a broadly shared underlying intuition about what consciousness is. As Max Velmans and Susan Schneider wrote in The Blackwell Companion to Consciousness: "Anything that we are aware of at a given moment forms part of our consciousness, making conscious experience at once the most familiar and most mysterious aspect of our lives." Wiki