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Interview

Igor Aleksander

Igor Aleksander is a leading researcher on machine consciousness. Julian Moore asked him about brains and language, self-awareness and robot rights.

Igor, you are the Gabor Professor of Neural Systems Engineering at Imperial College here in London, but your work started back in the middle sixties on individual neurons. Did you ever imagine that you’d one day end up discussing machine consciousness as a practical possibility?

No, I definitely didn’t. I was always against the idea of taking something like consciousness, which seemed to do with humans and biology, and talking about it technologically. But on one occasion, and in fact when I was being interviewed, someone said “This system that you have, which creates internal representations of an outside world, you could say it’s conscious.” So I said, “No, that’s absolute rubbish.

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