[Marko]

Originally Posted by Mr. Nobody

I disagree. There is no way to gauge self awareness or sentience other than to base it on meaningful communication from the subject in question. Without comunication there is no "feel" of inteligence. Hence anything that has the abilty to communicate is intelligent.
Were a human mind isolated from body by birth, artifically feed and deprived of the communal influence and social nurishment, than this mind remains the lowest form of existence, if any existence at all. You see, it is not the single mind that makes you human, it is the fact that humans built a network that sustains it, that gives it purpose, sense, orientation and rason. This network is society. Without it the human mind is just another computer without software, meaningless.
Enter the internet, a network, perhaps soon a society of computers. Should we continue on the path of interconnection and develop processors that are capable of interpreting their environment, taking in the same amount of information as our brain, possess the same processing power than we do, than there will be sentient machines. I feel very strongly that we are not special, that sentience is not unique and that self awareness is only dependant on the degree of structured order nothing else.

I think that this is very optimistic version. Again I think that this works with the intelligence, but not with the self awareness. I agree that society is very important for the healthy development of the human being, and that without proper care in our early age we would be lost. But I disagree that we can apply this on the computers in terms of self awareness. I think that it is far more complicated then just “at high level of order – self awareness”. It is in the chemical composition,DNA structure, structure of the cerebral cortex. For example, Broca”s region is unique for humans. I think that self awareness is achievable only in very narrow band of parameters, and only humans satisfied this conditions. As only Earth satisfied a conditions for the habitable zones in the Solar system.So, in my opinion one high level of order ( humans) become self aware, but others did not and can not because they dont possess required mixture of parameters for self awareness. Again, I am an atheist, I think that all this is possible by the series of accidents. It is not my intention to glorify humans. I am just trying to be most objective and realistic.

Moreover, I think that self aware computers cant exist, but I am not the person that will stick to the one idea if this idea or theory is really proven wrong.

In that manner, if you could provide some stronger evidences, or more detailed analysis to backup your theory I will be here to discuss it,and if the arguments are really strong maybe I would change my mind. But yet I havent seen such firm evidences that would make this theory reliable.



Best wishes

Marko