[Tyler]

A Turing Test for Consciousness
     

"Consciousness is part of the natural world. It depends, we believe,
only on mathematics and logic and on the imperfectly known laws of
physics, chemistry, and biology; it does not arise from some magical or
otherworldly quality. That's good news, because it means there's no
reason why consciousness can't be reproduced in a machine - in theory,
anyway."  Christof
Koch and Giulio
Tononi go on to say, in the IEEE Spectrum article Can Machines Be
Conscious?, that consciousness may not require many things
frequently associated with being human such as emotions,
long-term memory, self-reflection, language, or even external sensory
input. After describing what isn't part of consciousness, they attempt
to define it in terms of the amount of integrated information an entity
can generate. This leads them to propose various tests to determine if a
machine is conscious.
   

http://robots.net/article/2570.html