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Also see entry at AI
(The text in this article has been transferred from artificial consciousness with appropriate changes).
Genuine strong AI
Proponents of this view believe that strong AI is (or will be) real consciousness, albeit one that has not arisen naturally. The argument in favour of Genuine strong AI is essentially this: If strong AI is not real consciousness because it is exhibited by a machine then we must assume that the human is not a machine, albeit a biological one. If there is something which is not a machine about a human then it must be the soul (religion) or a magic spark (metaphysics) and science is bypassed. Some have proposed that the merger of the science of quantum mechanics and string theories or m-brane models of the universe would supply a third point or quantum link for special home for the human soul or special conscious connection. This does not block the development of artificial conscious in a quantum computer but would support it as a natural development. Therefore ordinary computers simulating conscious would not be really conscious but quantum computers would be.
This functionalist view, that the human being is truly a real machine, prompts us to ask what type of machine the brain is. That the brain is a machine of the Turing type is assumed because no more powerful computing paradigm has been discovered and all that is known about the brain (admittedly not very much), in the mainstream view, does nothing to contradict the supposition.
If this supposition is correct then the Church-Turing thesis applies and the possibility of Genuine strong AI being implemented on another machine of the Turing type must be admitted.
It is argued that until contradictory evidence is discovered, Occam's Razor and the Copernican principle support the view that strong AI can be real consciousness and that the building of strong AI which is real consciousness is likely: The argument goes: The human being is nothing but a machine. The Church-Turing thesis states that we need new physics before two computing machines are different; by Occam's Razor, we should not posit new physics without good reason. The Copernican principle states that we should claim no special position for human beings without good reason. The only "good" reasons we have are those of arrogance: Humans are supposedly too complicated or special (or some other similar term) for their brains to be built or copied artificially, or for an alternative artificial achitecture to the brain to be truly capable of consciousness.
The Genuine strong AI view assumes that anything that cannot be modelled by strong AI must be in contradiction with physicalism, but Thomas Nagel in his essay, What is it like to be a bat? (http://members.aol.com/NeoNoetics/Nagel_Bat.html), argues that subjective experience cannot be reduced, because it cannot be objectively observed, but subjective experience is not in contradiction with physicalism. In essence, Nagel is claiming subjective experience is impossible for a machine and therefore Genuine strong AI is similarly impossible.
Dennett and Hofstadter's rebuttal in their book, The Mind's I, is as in the first paragraph of this section: They say that subjective experience is Nagel's call to metaphysics, his "magic spark".
Human-like strong AI
As is to be expected, the Not-genuine and Genuine schools of thought differ on the question of whether strong AI needs to be human-like or whether it could be of an entirely different nature. Proponents of Genuine strong AI generally hold the view that strong AI does not need to be similar to human consciousness, which, according to some, is a very questionable view and a reference is required. Some who hold that strong AI can never be really conscious (i.e., Not-genuine strong AI proponents) hold that strong AI, not being real, can only be human-like because that is the only "true" model of consciousness that we will (most likely) ever have, and that this Not-genuine strong AI will be tested based on what we know about real consciousness.
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