[ShellfishMeme]

You say the machine wouldn't have sensations. Yet a cat and a human also are just complex machines. Maybe being a sufficiently complex machine is all that is needed to have sensations.

And if we could imagine for example that an ant or a fly actually experiences things, if it too has some sort of degree of what we as humans have when we see or hear things, maybe there actually already are machines that "see" and "experience" things.

The difference might just be that we as humans have the extra layer of meta observation that allows us to reason about our experience in the context of the world and turn us into an active participant in that experience while an ant or a neural network are mostly just passive observers even though they too make decisions and process information.

[raducu]

Complex is a very tricky question.

I think people already simulated a worm's neural nets, but we simulated just high level abstractions of what those "simple", 200 neuron networks are. Sure, by simulation tickling part of the worm, we get the exact reflex reactions a living worm would, but surely the simulated worm does not have sensations, I can do the same worm simulation with if-else statements, just because I see a worm realistically wiggling on the screen I do not believe it can suffer pain, or else I would never play Worms Armageddon.

I believe there is something to the chemical processes themselves that we will not be able to replicate in pure software.

That brings the question, what if we could simulate the quantum particles themselves, not just some high level representation of cells, would that simulated being have sensations/feelings?

If we perfectly simulated, at the quantum particle level a cat, would the cat behave like a real cat?

That is mindboggling to me; unfortunately we cannot do that yet.