Consciousness, coming to a machine near you.

The article lacks substance and makes a few logical blunders. I was expecting a good read given the title, but was disappointed.

"For example, is an earthworm conscious? Even this is hard question to ask but it's probably quite safe to assume it doesn't." There is no basis for this assumption and the first part of the article relies on it being true.

http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/consciousness/#2

The author then goes on to contradict himself by concluding - "One of the most fascinating things about consciousness is that we don't have any way of telling if anyone else is really conscious. For all we know everyone around us could just be acting unknowingly on inputs they're receiving from their sensory inputs. If we ever did create a conscious robot we would never really know if it was truly conscious or just acting in a way that made it seem conscious. Being able to merely say you're conscious doesn't make it so."

So why then did u assume that the earthworm doesn't have consciousness?

Another article kind of assuming that cousciousness is a subproduct of the brain.

Our current Physics' models are fundamentally excluding Consciousness. That's what's creating the fundamental problem.

Check Rober Penrose ideas for more: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roger_Penrose