System, Being and Consciousness
One of the current hot topics among researchers of artificial intelligence (AI) is about consciousness . Consciousness has been an object of interest for philosophers from several centuries. It is only in recent times that scientific curiosity into consciousness is gathering momentum. The reason for this new found interest is rapid advances in "autonomous" machines, which can be programmed to act rationally and take decisions "on their own". Rationality is fundamentally driven by two elements: self-interest and utility maximization . All living beings are rational. But there are several nuances as well. Utility maximization is an optimization problem at its core, and depends on how much information the autonomous agent has about the situation, how much it can afford to compute, and so on. And autonomy is not all about rationality. Humans and other animals which are known to behave autonomously, exhibit several other characteristics in addition to being drive...