Re: How much computing power would a computer have to have in order to attain

Hi Chris,

That's a very interesting question indeed, mainly because there isn't a
clear definition of "consciousness" in mathematical terms. We don't know
what causes consciousness or what it means, and most specifically how to
measure it. Are the machines shown in Terminator movies any combination of
"concious", "alive" or self-aware? We simply don't know.

What are the barriers between living organisms (bacteria, viruii, etc.)
that have no nervous system to speak of, and lower-intelligent animals with
nervous systems like, say insects, and higher-order animals such as
mammals, and then finally Human Beings.

Now comes the interesting part of computer science. Computing "power" is
measured in 2 different ways. One way is to measure the "type of problem" a
specific computer can solve, while the other way is to measure how fast the
computer can solve it. This may be a complex concept to understand, but
I'll try and give you an analogy. Think of a faucet of tap water that you
kept running - it is solving 2 problems - one problem is to give you
"water" and only water, while the other problem is to give it to you at a
desired speed. If you have it running full, you'll get 1 gallon of water
fast. If you leave it running a bit slower, you'll get 1 gallon of water
slower. But eventually, assuming the faucet keeps running, you will get 1
gallon of water. However, the faucet will never give you gasoline. It can
only solve one "type" of problem, which is to give you drinking water.
Different taps around the world will solve it at different speeds - some
will do it fast, some will do it slow. The same applies to computing.  

The second measure is the one you see being advertised in public media
mainly because almost all desktop computers in the world are
"Turing-Complete", meaning that they can do whatever a "Turing Machine" can
do. A "Turing Machine" has been proven to be able to solve any problem in
the universe, given enough time. This means that any computer you see
around you, given enough time, will be able to solve any problem so long as
the problem has a solution. Now if we assume that the problem of "giving a
computer consciousness" can be solved ever, then theoretically speaking,
when Alan Turing proposed the Turing Machine in 1936, we had a computer
powerful enough to gain consciousness, and ever since then, all the desktop
computers we have are powerful enough to gain consciousness too. 

Practically speaking, your desktop computer may be too slow to be able to
react at the speed a Human Being reacts. But until we have an algorithm, or
instruction set for consciousness, we really don't know what speed the
computer would have to run at to make it respond in real-time compared to
Human Beings.

I hope this has been helpful. If you want to pursue this further, you
should certainly read more about "Soft Computing" and "Artificial
Intelligence". While not making machines conscious, these areas of
computing focus on enabling computers to act more like humans in terms of
complex/fuzzy decision making, creativity, composing music, writing poetry,
etc.