Self-awareness and a hypothetical robot

This article is for entertainment purposes, I am not a specialist in the field of consciousness. But since and there is no good definition for this term, then why not.

I don’t know what consciousness is. But I suggest a way how we can figure it out in the future. With the help of a future hypothetical robot.

Robot M sees an object A in front of him. We consider, for simplicity, that the robot is its own program for simulating its work. I will use the word “obvious” carefully, the robot must have some kind of program that will build a model of space in which it will make calculations – distances to objects, etc. Perhaps in the future there will be robots that will not have programs and will work strictly on intuition, where the camera will immediately give him intuitive knowledge, without any memory and processor. But we will not consider this option.

Those. a robot in his modeling machine models something like this

As we can see, M ≠ M`.

The next step is to add the ability to think to the robot. Naturally, he can think only with objects A` and M`. And he, like a machine, has no self-awareness, he only models objects.

So, we are almost there. To make the robot do what we need, we need to introduce a simple bug into his thoughts. It is necessary that he forget in his reflections that he thinks in his model of the objects A` and M`. And this is practically true. After all, if the model is correct, then it makes no sense to make a reservation every time that he sees, for example, a fake tree. After all, his model is adequate. And most importantly, he should think that M = M`. Then, seeing a real object outside his mental apparatus, his mental apparatus, in his opinion, contains only himself. And the recursion we need appears.

At this stage, we relieve ourselves of responsibility, now it is not our task, let the robot and he find out what self-consciousness is. And then he will tell us.