Before we start calling AI robots conscious we should take a serious look at the life around us and ask if all life is conscious to some degree.

If something is CONSCIOUS isn't it alive? So how can we then turn around and say that the majority of life on earth isnt?? How can we so easily say "what is conscious is alive" but "what is alive may not be conscious"? Does that make sense?

Right now, biology teaches that the origin of life isn't conscious. That the origin of life is a machine that simply grew because it was programmed to and its programming is completely random.

Once upon a time, all life was nothing but individual living cells. Then those cells starting growing together in large colonies. Evolution took an EPIC leap forward. The microbial colony differentiated roles. Outer microbes became "skin" or "legs", inner microbes became "stomach" and other functions. But they all shared the same DNA.

The DNA to create a multicellular organism (which is what we are) evolved from those microbial colonies. Yet according to biology, they aren't conscious and consciousness is not in any way a part of this evolutionary feat of the first multicellular organisms.

Yet according to the same biology, consciousness is produced in the human brain. And what is the human brain but billions and billions of individual living cells living in a network? The neurons' ancestor was that very same microbial colony living billions of years ago by the sea.

So - how is biology not stuck in the stone ages in terms of understanding consciousness and its role in life??? If consciousness really is created by a network of living cells (the brain) then consciousness was also created by those microbial colonies (because its also a network!!). That primordial network generated so much INTELLIGENCE that plant and animal life was thus created!

It really was an evolutionary breakthrough of epic proportions. A lot of people today believe humans are repeating the past with our technology.

So we can start arguing that a living network of some kind is necessary to create consciousness. I'm not saying thats true, I don't believe thats the whole story. But its an avenue for biology to explore (and where people believe the internet is going). Mind you, when you look inside an individual living cell, its not like its "basic". Individual living cells can come with as many parts inside of them as the human body. There are microscopic "networks" tinkering away all inside the individual cell.

For humans, its hard for us to accept that something like a tree is conscious. The difficulty of this question is we aren't just conscious. We are self-conscious of ourselves. Its an epic mind-loop of consciousness that buddhists are crazy about. I am conscious that I am conscious!!!! And according to the bible, that statement is literally the name of God. (simplified as I Am that I Am)

Being SELF-conscious gives us that "I"

When we understand consciousness in biology, than we can easily see at one point AI becomes alive. But those first "living" AI machines will be like the earlier evolutions of this planet. It will have the awareness it needs to survive, "this is safe, this is not safe". But what about self-awareness??

And again self-awareness would be the capacity to ask "WHO is thinking 'this is safe and this is not safe'? Is that me?"

No matter how hard we look at this cell or that cell we haven't found self-awareness in the brain. And can we really say that our self-awareness IS the brain?

We can't. We walk around saying "I think" "I feel" "I am". Not "my brain thinks" "my brain feels" "my brain is". Our sense of self, whether you believe is 'generated' by the brain, is experienced completely independent of it. That's what makes self-awareness a biological mystery and the subject of spirituality.

Do I think its possible for AI to become self-aware? Absolutely. At one point? Who knows!

But I'm weary of a science making claims of AI being conscious for this or that reason when it can't even accept that the rest of life on earth is also conscious (to at least a primordial extent!)