Scientific advancement has allowed humans to create artificial versions of everything from chemicals to food to electricity. One of the benefits of science is precisely this kind of replication or modification of certain things that already occur in nature. What of things that are not a part of the material world even though they have a very intimate relationship with it? More specifically, what about something like consciousness? The attempt to create artificial minds, as opposed to just a scripted response in a robot or computer with no actual thought and awareness behind it, is the most philosophically significant purpose of investigating the behavior and possible mental states behind artificial intelligences.
There are two components to a truly conscious machine that are imitations of something directly experienced in everyday life no matter someone's era and location and something more familiar to moderners. Artificial intelligence relies on artificially generated electricity to power a simulated consciousness. It is the combination of these two imitations, one of natural phenomena and the other of the phenomenological reality correlated with other natural phenomena. The former is electricity and the latter is consciousness. Whether an AI possesses genuine consciousness is irrelevant to this point, of course, because either seeming or true sentience on its part would still be a simulation of actual human consciousness.
If a conscious robot was created by arranging the hardware so that an actual mind sprung into existence from it, it would be impossible to know. Consciousness is intangible and therefore only provable by direct experience with it; scientific observation could only pertain to outwardly visible behaviors of matter instead of the immaterial thoughts and perceptions of a mind. Only some kind of telepathy would let an ordinary human consciousness even start to truly see if other minds exist at all. This prevents me from knowing if either other people, animals, a robot, or a computer program have their own mind no matter how much they might seem to be conscious.
This does not mean that conceptual truths about artificial intelligence cannot be known, for they can indeed be proven by assessing the issue rationalistically. The epistemological unverifiability of other minds is itself something about the subject that can be known with absolute certainty! The fact that current approaches to creating a sentient kind of artificial intelligence (however successful or unsuccessful they are) conceptually involve artificial electricity to produce artificial consciousness, as opposed to a mind that animates a biological, organic body of living tissue, is another such thing. It is logically possible for one kind of imitation to help bring the other into existence--we just could never know if it will or has already happened.
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