Can we build conscious machines? Vedantic & modern perspective | Prof L Behera | Director, IIT Mandi

It is assumed that all living beings are conscious machines. Can we build such a conscious machine that will be as natural as living beings? What is the modern understanding of consciousness? How is the ancient Vedantic understanding of consciousness different from this? Applications like Alexa and Siri have made us believe that conscious machines are being built.

Artificial Intelligence in its new incarnation is making waves across the world for being able to make machines intelligent. Despite this progress, the debate on 'what is consciousness ?' is very much on. The philosophical deliberations, scientific empirical evidence, and first-person perspectives are subject matters of such debates. Even if such a machine become reality, does it as much conscious as Vedanta talks about Jīva?

In this talk, Prof L. Behera will define the hard problem of consciousness and will reflect upon the current state of AI machines. Through empirical evidence, he will explain the bottlenecks in solving the hard problem. He will discuss the possibility of constructing such a machine on basis of Vedantic and modern parameters. He is working on developing a framework to build an artificial conscious machine. He has presented some of his works at MIT and the California Institute of Integral Studies.