How Do yoU knoW anYone elSe haS a ConscioUs MinD....

It's obvious they just act the right way giving sensible answer to reasonable questions , laughing at your jokes , buying a round of drinks. But how do you really know? What's to say they aren't just machines , programmed to respond in the right way? In 1950 the pioneering British computer scientist Alan Turing argued that such a machine might one day be possible with its artificial intelligence (AI) being impossible to tell apart from the real thing.

It's scary thought , but so far there's no immediate worry about chatting up in a tin box. During the 1980s, there was much excitement over so called expert systems , which tried to give computers human-like expertise in tasks like medical diagnosis. In practice, the computers proved far less flexible than human experts spawning the 'computers says no' syndrome.
But according to British Al researcher Steve Grand, big advances may be out to come from a better understanding of how the brains works. "The brain is the only working example of an intelligent system we have, " he says.

One of the most promising developments is neural computing ,where conventional computers are programmed to act like net works to brain cells. This has allowed computers to be trained to do things like driving vehicles, without being laboriously programmed. Even so, it's pretty clear they aren't really thinking so far , at least.