RE: What is the final product of evolution?

No, I'm saying that consciousness doesn't really exist. The illusion is just a bubble surrounding a machine.

We are already living in the illusion. What IS consciousness? It's hard to define, right?
It's just the idea of taking in sensory information and processing it, isn't it?

It's mechanical and stilted. Smarterchild, that old chat AI, is like the most thin bubble. A few words, and you realize it's just a machine. Pop.

Cleverbot is a bit better, the bubble of consciousness illusion is thicker. You might be fooled for a bit. Even it might be fooled, from its own perspective. But with prodding... Pop.

Introduce: The Human Machine. Me or you.

How mechanical are we? Of course it seems complex, just complex enough to fool us into thinking we're free-willed or something, or that we're not a machine. But we can't see the code that we're running on. The system architecture is too complex to fully comprehend.

Yet, it is still a machine. That means our consciousness is just another bubble, and if poked enough, it could pop, revealing that we are just mechanical beings, and that the real pilot is our genetic code. Not the brain.

Pop.

I love the way you word your thoughts!

This idea that consciousness doesn't exist is becoming very popular! It reminds me of the logical positivists, who swept every question they disliked under the rag by claiming "this statement is (literally) meaningless". Problem solved. Next question.

It's funny how I'm having the exact same discussion on another post. So I'll again just quote my response:

I'm aware of all the ways our minds trick us, but that's a different question. There is one thing about which it's impossible to be wrong - the one thing in the world we're certain about - and that's that we exist. That's what Descartes proved with his famous line (there's a whole passage and a whole book wrapped around that single line), even though it's fashionable sometimes now to challenge it, but really no one could ever prove him wrong without contradicting themselves. I could be a brain in a vat, you could be a robot, this could all be happening in my mind or in a dream, I could have been created just a millisecond ago and all my memories could be implanted - but there's one thing I can't be wrong about: I AM. (And by that, we mean consciousness, we mean our qualia to use the philosophical term.)

It's funny how you can be so sure that things around you (like cleverbots) exist, but consciousness? No, that's an illusion!

Anyway, any further probing into this issue will just become too long.