I believe that there is a difference between receiving a consciousness symbol by informational way, and generating this symbol from beingness, the only way that ensure awareness. A machine with consciousness (self-consciousness included) cannot have awareness if it does not have beingness.
But how can we know that such a machine does not have beingness and hence awareness ? Its behavior is practically human, almost identical with what we see in many people. We left here a reserve since we felt that there must a test of awareness, of beingness.
The class of conscious machines is no doubt a class of superior machines, of machines nearly human, laking only beingness. And still, such a machine only mimes the man. Its consciousness was blown into it by man and then the machine became an actor, and just as any actor it tends to imitate the behavior of the real subject. Such a machine can in principle read, write, talk, can feel pleasure and pain, can construct physically and theoretically, etc. It is a genuine artificial animal with whom man can enter into competition and cooperation. Such a machine with consciousness will be nearly a man. But what is there that makes it different from man, as regards its functioning and its behavior ?

Since we have considered beingness as an objective phenomenon (producing, quite true, subjective impressions), we could ask ourselves: how can one distinguish the human from the nearly-human machine ? How can one transfer from a nearly-human machine to a human-machine ? As long as we do not know how beingness takes place, what its nature is, we can only guess that it is due to a certain complexity of organization of the living matter. Hence it might be that by creating nearly-human machines (more and more complex) one will meet, wanting or not, the beingness, as a result of the increase in complexity. It is also possible that the self-development of the nearly-human machine will lead to the same situation. When will such a machine declare itself to be human ? Let's turn back to the test asked before. It seems that we are not able to test a nearly-human machine for having or not having the beingness, or at least we do not see at the moment any way of doing it directly. But one cannot eliminate the possibility of such a test being found in the future, we even guess that it will be found once we consider the beingness as a material phenomenon.
Now we can ask: does beingness have only the singular role of providing the awareness, something that is not entirely essential for the functioning of the nearly-human machine, or does it play a deeper role in the human being ? First we shall observe that, without beingness existing in humans, the nearly-human machine will never be, since it will have no possibility to get the structures and the key-words of the beingness-derived consciousness. Were the man only nearly-human, then he would have to get from outside, possibly from a supernatural source, the symbols and the key-words of self-consciousness. But this is not so, since beingness is born in man as an objective phenomenon, of a class different from the class of the other material phenomena including the rational and the intellectual ones. The primitive symbol of existence is born in the human intellect, while the primitive symbol of "know" is born in his deeper thinking, in his rationality. "To know" is deeper than "to be". The succession live - be - know reflects, in a way, a mechanism of knowledge. Beingness is present in every act of human awareness. But the acts of awareness can be converted into acts of consciousness, man can work himself as a nearly-man.

There is still another aspect of beingness that we have not considered so far. This is the participation of the human affection to the act of being. Beingness is also an affectively neutral act, covering in equal proportions the positive and the negative feelings. Hence beingness leaves traces not only in the rational and intellectual fields but also in the field of affections. One could say that the trace left by the beingness in the field of affections is the key to man's spiritual life. Beingness awakens not only the self-consciousness but also man's spiritual life. One finds that the whole of the rational life is organized around the traces left by beingness that is around "be" and "know". Around beingness's affection trace one finds man's whole spiritual life. But spiritual life also implies reason, without which man could never reach the heights and the depths of the existence.

The outwards behavior of man represents his actions, while the inwards behavior of man represents his spiritual life. The spiritual life originates in the trace left by beingness in the field of affections, but it also contains the self-consciousness. It can also be view as an affective motion started in the self-consciousness, but this is a spiritual life that does not go to the source, just as self-consciousness does not go to the source without awareness. This thing in itself shows that spiritual life extends from its source to the different layers of ourselves, in fact of the behavior of our central nervous system. But it remains centered around the trace of beingness, seeming to enter beingness, bringing about our knowledge, generating our thirst for knowledge. Beingness is a fundamental phenomenon containing our spiritual life, with deep implications in our functioning, and I believe that it is this aspect that could fundamentally distinguish the human from the nearly-human. The spiritual life springing only from the self-consciousness will be a fake, will have no philosophical calling and purpose. The nearly-human will not be able to reach the heights of spiritual life proper to humans; it is here that the nearly-human will sound a fake.

The Awareness Experiment 53