Self-awareness

Where does it come from? Will any of the human endeavors to make machine aware of themselves be fruitful? These questions came to my mind when I was preparing for my Computer Architecture exam. I haven't take any robotics or articificial course. But as far as I know, every computers currently in the world are modeled using John von Neumann stored program model. In this model, machine instructions are stored in the storage deviced connected to the computer. Those instructions are read one by one by the computer and 'executed'. Whatever the result, the computer doesn't have any interpretation for that. Everything is mechanical.

In last paragraph I put 'executed' within quotes. 'Executed' in this case means, the computer generates control signal to control the different functional units. Those control signals are immutable. They are preprogrammed either hardwired or microprogrammed. 'Executed' didn't mean the computer actually 'understood' the instructions and carried that out. Again, question comes what does 'understood' mean? Intelligent beings do not blindly carry out an instruction. First they 'reason' about that. If the instruction makes sense, then only they carry out the instruction.

Now, question comes, an illogical entity, like computer, that never reasons about the instruction given to it will ever be able to reason about its own existence. Unless, we change the fundamental model of computation, it is not possible. Let me repeat, I am unaware of the things going on in the field of robotics and artificial intelligence. It may be true that they already are using different mode of computation, apart from simply the programming languages. If I find out more about that I will certainly post them here.

And lastly, I put 'reason' within quotes in last paragraph. What do I mean by 'reason', here? How are we able to 'reason' whereas the machines are not? The 'reason' itself is human invention. It is possible that we are simply trying to assert our own superiority by inventing things we know machines aren't able to do. Or may be we are insecure about our own superiority? Are we actually superior over other beings? If we continue like this, another question comes to mind. How did we evolve to be able to 'reason'? I think if we try to reason beyond this, then we need to take help of meta-reason, theory to explain 'reason' itself, and I am not sure I will want to do that.