The fundamental difficulty is understanding the relationship between physical phenomena and our mental representation of those phenomena. This is what Australian philosopher David Chalmers has called the "hard problem" of consciousness. There is no consensus on how, if at all, consciousness can arise from physical systems. One common view is called physicalism: the idea that consciousness is a purely physical phenomenon. If this is the case, there is no reason why a machine with the right programming could not possess a human-like mind.