What is Consciousness?

Our first panel was directed by Kim Binsted(scientist) and Peter Watts(writer).

It was crowded: people were standing in the back. Peter Watts is very good speaker and was good at this panel. Kim gave him a nice counterpoint. We love to look at Kim’s work about AI. The panel was centered on the following question: Why do we need consciousness?

Peter took the approach that consciousness is not a goal but a byproduct of the life itself. It helps for survival but its not really needed when we look at the whole picture.

Kim is more deterministic school of thought. Consciousness is a program that can be reproduced by artificial means. It`s analyzing input of the outside world.

The real matter is not artificial, natural or even consciousness but how we define ourselves.