Kurzweil in his AI Website describes consciousness as the ability to have subjective experience. The ability of a being, animal, or entity to have self-perception and self-awareness. The ability to feel.

What Mr. Kruzweil would have us believe is that a key question in the twenty-first century is whether computers will achieve consciousness (which their human creators are considered to have).

My take on this is that even if the advances of AI eventually give birth to self-aware or spiritual machines, I am not sure they would thank us, their human creators, for having created them with feelings. Over the history of mankind while it has been human feelings that have helped man reach the highest pinnacle of spirituality, it is also the feelings that have made man do sad and sordid things. Feelings have often made us judgemental in our attitude.

Passion and fanatisim, love and possessiveness, expectations and disappointments, longing and hate have often made their appearance holding hands. Da Vinci and Hitler both have been people consumed by their feelings. Both of them left their legacy - one of inspirated creations and the other of deprived destruction: both prisoners to their own feelings.

Today, I find myself, once again, held to ransom by my own feelings, expectations and disappointments. It make me wonder if the Vulcan ritual of Koh-li-naar should really be made a mandatory part of human education. A world where logic reigns supreme would perchance be boring but maybe the neural pathways through which emotions ravage the consiousness would be rendered dry and perhaps peace of mind would finally come. I wonder if loosing out on inspirations would be worth gaining peace of mind....

Live long and Prosper.