Self-Aware Robots?

Science fiction is full of accounts in which robots become self-aware and in no time are devising complex plans to take over the world. In the following video, Hod Lipson demonstrates how, inspired by the greatest known designer-the process of evolution, his team has managed to create some robots that seem to be slowly developing some rudimentary sense of self: nothing to be worried about...

Having watched this very impressive work, it also occurred to me that even if at some point the robots do develop a robust sense of self and become conscious, definitively proving that consciousness does in fact arise out of non-conscious constituents, we are still going to be left without an explanation of how consciousness arises out of physical constituents.

For more on "the hard problem of consciousness," as Australian philosopher of mind David Chalmers puts it, namely the challenge to explain how the physical processes of the brain produce subjective experiences and phenomenological points of view, and to get a great and fascinating introduction to philosophy of mind, you can read one of his own papers below (reposted from the Journal of Consciousness Studies):

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