Comment Re:Scalzi on Stross on ST (Score 1) 809
I took a class in neural networks almost 20 years ago. One project was to get a small network to "learn" how to recugnize handwritten numbers. On a 486/33 running overnight it got to the point where it could recognize a number right over 90% of the time, just with a a few dozen neurons. However, it would probably be impossible to determine *why* that network was able to recognize the numbers.
Consciousness (however you want to define it) is almost certainly an emergent property, and if it can emerge in a toddler it should be able to emerge in a properly designed piece of hardware. And even you can you can do a core dump on that hardware, you'll *never* figure out why it's conscious.