I’m currently taking AP Psychology, and I remembered a random conjecture a while back. Although I’ve only read a chapter in the book, I’ve gotten a bit more perspective on psychology and consciousness. Surprisingly my idea happens to be pretty much the same as Skinner’s idea that people are not actually in control of their actions and that there is no free will. All actions are determined by a combination of nature and nurture.

Some of these topics merge with philosophy however and start becoming confusing, as does the term consciousness itself.

But the most important part I forgot to mention about the idea is that because conscious functioning and learning of animals is just based on simple input output like machines, which is what determinism (or at least my previous idea) is, artificial intelligence could easily programmed with any type of code, since all code supports if then statements. All you would need to program any animal is to know every single variable involved, and then provide every variable a certain significance value to determine how important the variable is to the overall equation. For example, if you gave the “hunger” variable a 1/10, the algorithm would not consider than an important factor in making decisions. These default values would be your genes. However, because biological determinism simply cannot be possible, the default values can be overpowered by nurture. At this point it’s too complicated without some crazy diagram or something.

Once you can successfully mimic all the variables on a human level in a machine, all the work is pretty much done. Animals are kind of like OSs, but they are programmed to learn. So once you’ve got the “OS” ready, it’ll just start programming itself as long as you teach it.

Very disorganized idea overall, because there were too many things I wanted to cover. But at least I will remember it.

This is just an idea for now which I will come back to once I’ve mastered a few other things.