James Cameron

Like a dog doesn't recognize itself as an individual.

a mirror and we think of dogs as conscious and of course they are uh and they're they're emotive and they're empathetic and they're very much like us emotionally but they don't have a consciousness high enough to recognize their individual selves in a mirror but an elephant can a chimpanzee can and a dolphin can and i don't know if they've done that i think they've proven that a beluga whale can as well but i don't think they've done it with the great whales

It's just a little difficult to do because you can't put them in a tank and study them like some of the smaller toothed whales like dolphins and belugas.

But anyway, there's even a parrot species in New Zealand that is intelligent enough to recognize itself as an individual.

Most birds can't.

So you've got these glimmers of emergent consciousness besides us.

And now we're going to have machine consciousness emerging in the next decade.

or whatever it's going to be, and that's going to be a whole new set of challenges for us as well.

We don't even understand consciousness yet in ourselves, and now we're going to have to start relating to this alien consciousness that we create.

Bingo, or a conscience.

I think you can have, if you believe in some kind of animus or spirit or soul or whatever it is that's persistent beyond the biological framework, I personally don't, just saying that up front.

But I also, I won't bet completely against something that just hasn't simply been proven yet.

But I also only—I believe in believing in things that have been empirically demonstrated and being kind of agnostic or fluid about everything else, right?

But if you do believe in that, then—

A machine couldn't possibly have that, now could it?

Because we didn't create that in the first place, and if we think we can create a machine that can have it, then we can't.

So now you get the sort of the soulless Frankenstein kind of mythology around that.

On the other hand, if you believe that consciousness is this...

kind of field of operations that is almost infinitely complex but can be understood as a real-world thing based in matter, then theoretically a machine intelligence could be as soulful, as empathetic, as emotional as us, although it might be very, very different.

And then you get into the quantum physics of consciousness, where you've got observer effect and things like that, where there seems to be some link at a quantum level with consciousness, and then all bets are off.