| > Your conceptual model is way too vague. Same can be said for you? A "Thinkpad" is nowhere near as sophisticated as a human. Your challenge equates to something like "Go put a human pancreas cell in a jungle hut in a bath of nutrients. Come back in a month. It will be dead and not have even tried to survive." At a certain level of abstraction, the matter you are comprised of is indistinguishable from a computer, while still being a useful comparison: despite the means, circuits and cells both take signals, process and return modified signals. Likewise, we can compare both of these things to a member of a colony organism, such as an ant. Though each element has different levels of sophistication the actual "sentience" occurs at a higher level... a sum of all the signals leading to a decision. For a human, whose thoughts surf over a network of squishy cells, this decision might lead to something like movement or dance. To an ant colony - movement or dance is not really an option... it is a big deal to move the colony, no matter how much movement any given ant might display. For an AI - well it would entirely depend on attached mechanisms. Have you not seen humanoid robots move or dance? Given enough circuits in an appropriately sophisticated arrangement, could we conceive of a robot that observes visual signals, makes decisions about the information, and subsequently changes it behavior in response? That sequence alone qualifies that mechanism as "Sentient", though we might not be able to declare that it is "Sapient" or has "Consciousness". > Frankly I think you should probably shut yours off for a while. Frankly, I think you should read something like a basic text describing these issues. A simple primer to give you at least a basic footing in this conversation. The concepts I've just described are decades old and have been continuously poured over by thousands of people much smarter than you or I. |