How Brains Perceive the World

Then knowledge is to be found not in the experiences but in the process of reasoning about them; it is here, seemingly, not in the experiences, that it is possible to grasp being and truth. Plato, Theaetetus Can machines ever be sentient? Could they perceive and feel things, be conscious of their surroundings? What are the prospects of achieving sentience in a machine? What are the dangers associated with such an endeavor, and is it even ethical to embark on such a path to begin with? In the series of articles of this column, I discuss one possible path toward “general intelligence” in machines: to use the process of Darwinian evolution to produce artificial brains that can be grafted onto mobile robotic platforms, with the goal of achieving fully embodied sentient machines. © 2024 Massachusetts Institute of Technology.