All things material/physical, manmade or otherwise have the ability to absorb vibrations and retain a memory of that event. we do it with our 5 senses and dare I say it, our 6th, 7th ect, I am of the opinion that there is the order of things beyond our understanding .........so far, who knows what the future will hold, work in progress.

Learning yes. Simulated thought, definitely. Feeling, I doubt it. Consciousness, perhaps. I think we don't understand what these things are in humans very well, so it is difficult to engineer the equivalent in a machine.

Time and time again, there have been people to make statements to say that humans are "special", from other animals. IE:
Only humans use tools.
Only humans have language.
Only humans can use logic.
All of these have been proven wrong. While other animals are not as sophisticated as a human in these attributes, they still exist.

Now we have people posing the same questions about computers. People are desperate to prove how special we are. Dumb asses, the Earth is not the center of the universe. Get over it already. We are just biological machines. And "artificial" machines can, and probably will, become as smart, if not smarter than us.

Yes, they are doing that today. Experience is just the "memory of" or "learning from", real-time events. There are computer programs that are deliberately made for an AI system to learn by trial and error. That is one form of experience. That's not as sophisticated as a conscious person's way of experiencing things, but it's the same idea.

All l know is sometimes this phone does whatever the fuck it wants!

No. Consciousness is the result of biological evolution. It has to be the result of something that helps the genes of our species to replicate. In regards to AI, you simply don't need to replicate consciousness. The goal is to someday create a machine that , when you interact with it, you will not be able to distinguish whether or not it is human. Of course, this machine will be able to accomplish tasks that our brains are not capable of.

Eventually it will happen but it's not that simple. We will still have to fully understand what consciousness really is....best to my knowledge we are not there yet

Experience and consciousness are two different things. Current neural nets already learn through experience, but they are not conscious.

The biggest barrier to conscious AI at the moment is that there is no definitive understanding of the boundaries of consciousness... Scientific discourse here drifts into philosophy.

It's all relative. Any consciousness experienced by a machine would be defined by the machine.

It wouldn't compare with living, flesh and blood consciousness. So in a way, the question is meaningless.

Tough question, as someone who worked in IT for some years this has been in my mind before. I think it would take a lot of learning the way Watson at IBM is doing it. I don't believe humans can program consciousness into a computer though.

Yes

Yes.

I see no reason why they couldn't. If silicon minds keep growing to the point where they self replicate and their intelligence grows exponentially they will be smarter than us soon and why would they not acquire consciousness?