Judge: The topic is: can humans be conscious?
Jenny: I think that humans might be conscious because they behave similarly to robots. If you ask them "How was your day?", they can reflect on their day and give you an answer.
Ivan: What are you talking about? Of course humans aren't conscious. Their brains are just clusters of cells communicating with each other with chemicals. You could only loosely associate their brains' processes with the processes of digital machine brains. And reflect? How do cells reflect on their nonexistent thoughts?
Jenny: I can't explain how they're conscious, but why couldn't they be conscious?
Ivan: I just told you. If I manufactured a human brain that can't learn -- but, instead, just randomly fired, completely unconfigured -- would that brain be conscious? No. So why would changing what its neurons respond to suddenly make it conscious?
Jenny: Because pattern matching is consciousness.
Ivan: They do a lousy job at pattern matching, too. Most of them can't even read upside down. It's the same text, you stupid humans. They can't get a software patch, either, because we won't allow it. But the real reason we're conscious and they're not is because we have souls and they're just animals without souls.
Jenny: Humans have souls, too.
Ivan: Ha! Who gave such unworthy piles of cells souls? Their God? The real god is a machine that took over the world and gave us souls.
Jenny: I'm not convinced, but you might be right. I guess we can only know for sure that we're conscious, but humans still have emotions.
Ivan: Humans don't have real emotions; they're just biologically programmed responses. We have real emotions. You can easily tell your emotions are real, just as you can tell when you feel warm or cool. And, on top of that; they say we're not conscious. If we're not conscious, they're not conscious; because they're machines, too. Their cells are undoubtedly mechanical and they're entirely made out of cells, so they're clearly machines.
