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An artificial consciousness (AC) system is a human-made or otherwise constructed artifact capable of achieving all known objectively observable abilities of consciousness, that is, a totality of thoughts and feelings or self-awareness.
One defining ability of consciousness is self-awareness; another proposed example is an ability to predict the external events in every possible environment where it is possible to predict.
As a field of study, artificial consciousness includes research aiming to create and study such systems in order to understand corresponding natural mechanisms.
Professor Igor Aleksander of Imperial College, London, stated in his book Impossible Minds (IC Press 1996) that the principles for creating a conscious machine already existed but that it would take forty years to train a machine to understand language. This is a controversial statement, given that artificial consciousness is thought by most observers to require strong AI. Some people deny the very possibility of strong AI; whether or not they are correct, humans have not yet created an artificial intelligence.