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In Robot Discovers Itself, Adapts to Injury , a Cornell University researcher claim their robot is "conscious" on a primitive level, because it thinks to itself, "What would happen if I do this?" He adds "Whether humans or animals are conscious in a similar way -- do we also think in terms of a self-image, and rehearse actions in our head before trying them out -- is still an open question.
A lively discussion on both sides follow in the comments.

Additional references:

• The Chinese Room argument (wiki) is a thought experiment designed by John Searle (Minds, Brains, and Programs, 1980) to argue against "strong artificial intelligence" - that an appropriately programmed computer isn't simply a simulation or model of a mind; it actually counts as a mind.
  
• Consciousness Explained (wiki) is a 1991 controversial book by the American philosopher Daniel Dennett which attempts to explain how consciousness arises from interaction of physical and cognitive processes in the brain.
• Dennett and the Darwinizing of Free Will By David P. Barash (2003) Essay Review states
  Benjamin Libet, who revealed the existence of “readiness potentials,” unconscious neural events that reliably occur a few hundred milliseconds before subjects realized they had decided to perform a simple physical movement. This work has been cited, waggishly, as showing that we don’t have free will so much as "free won’t," but is it really as devastating for "autonomous man" as Dennett believes? Maybe a readiness potential simply indicates that we actually make up our minds a fraction of a second or so before we realize that we do. Does this circumscribe our freedom or merely reset it a bit earlier than each of us used to believe? Perhaps decision-making simply takes time.
  

Labels: philosophy, robotics