Is Watson conscious?

Is IBM's Watson conscious?Is it aware, alert, responsive?Is is sentient? Can it feel?Is sentience necessary to being conscious?

It seems Watson from IBM is very close to what most folk would recognize as being conscious, perhaps even having a personality. It has vision and speech capabilities, is capable of independent learning, of holding conversations, recognizing context based meanings and better at recognizing faces and attaching those faces to names and personalities than I am. It is versatile, can multi task, acquire new data on it's own, make independent associations, hold conversations, handle idiomatic conversation and do so in several languages.It seems aware of "self" as well as the limitations of itself. That often goes beyond what many humans seem capable of when it comes to self awareness.

If there is no way to differentiate between the illusion and the reality is there really a difference?

Isn't it?Since Watson now has vision as well as hearing are they not sensory inputs?I pulled sentience out as separate from consciousness since the question or "emotion" or "Feeling" is somewhat different.I've know quite a few people who seem to lack feelings in certain circumstances yet I never doubted they were conscious.There is also the question of whether or not Watson should be considered as alive but that I think should await a decision on consciousness.

Historically the two have been considered as separate, consciousness being the ability to be aware while sentience is the ability to feel. The former is more a matter of identifying and cataloging while the later is more a matter of making value judgements based on what is catalogued and identified.There is a question often brought up in studies of whether it is possible to be aware of things and still not be conscious of them.An example is that Watson can identify and catalogue which flavor ice cream sells the most but not which tastes best, which treatment regimen reports the least side effects but not which hurts less, which popular song gets played most but not which popular song sounds best.