Article - What would separate you from the robotic you ?

                  Human mind is probably one of the most complex things existing. Viewing

through the lens called science, you doubt does anything like a mind even exists or is it

only a combination of our concious and sub-concious brain activities. See yourself the level of

complexity ! Everything that happens to us is stored in the form of memories in a our

brain. What a person thinks or acts today, largely depends upon the experiences and

conclusions from life he has spent till now. Influences of our family members, friends,

famous personalities and idols, movies, games etc. have significant impact on our way of

thinking. Even reading this article might give rise to new thoughts, theories and

inferences, though it might seem like a daily ordinary reading activity. So, as far as

humans are concerned, they react upon a given situation on the basis of history that

resides in the form of links between neurons in their brain.

                    Many popular fiction books discuss "What if the robots were given the same memories as you ? Then what would separate you from the robotic you ?" . "The android concept" as most of us know. If your answer is "feelings" distinguish the both, then from the point of view of a biologist,

human feelings like pain and pleasure may be interpreted in terms of some chemicals in

our body being released in response to external influences. They are just complex

chemicals and can be artificially produced and induced into robot's body someday in future. The

other aspect is capability to learn on our own. If we are able to produce a complex

artificial brain for a robot, it may possess this ability too. Then what actually makes us so

human ?

                    There are few words that cannot be defined in technical terms, theses are hope,

faith, love, hatred, like, dislike that we experience in our daily lives. Some of them exist

just without having any reason. You may dislike a food for how it smells while others

in your family might love eating it. Here comes into role the uniqueness of one's personality.

Even definition of beauty is more of a psychological rather than a physical concept. Imagining

something that has never happened. Generating a picture in your mind just by listening to

a description. We always create a pre-handed personality image of a person we going to

meet for the first time just from their name, age, profession etc. We just can't help it. The

intuitions that astonish us by turning to reality the next moment. Motivating yourself by

imagining in your mind the accomplishment of a goal so many times and it may be possible

that it never turns into reality. It might seem too illogical but everyone of us dream of

fulfilling some goal. Sometimes we are changed by circumstances and sometimes

circumstances change us.

Humans make mistakes and they are never perfect in following the guidelines. But they always reach where they are destined to be. America was discovered out of a mistake! Even if robots in the coming decades will achieve all human like characteristics, still we shall have the privilege to imagine, dream and achieve that they can never understand because they are just so humanly things!!

          

                                                                                                                - N K Sran