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> You'll have to discuss these matters with computationalists. One doesn’t have to be a “computationalist” to believe that AIs have consciousness or intentionality. Consider panpsychism, according to which all physical matter (from quarks and leptons to stars and galaxies) possesses consciousness and intentionality, even if only in a rudimentary form. Obviously humans possess it in a much more developed form, but the consciousness and intentionality of a human differs from that of an electron only in degree not in essence. Coming to physical computers running AIs, given they (at times) can give a passable simulation of human consciousness and intentionality, it is plausible their consciousness and intentionality is much closer to that of a human that to that of an electron. Do I personally believe this is true? No. But that’s not the point - the point is you don’t have to be a computationalist to believe that AIs have (or might have) consciousness and intentionality, so even if your arguments against computationalism are correct (and while I’m no computationalist myself, I don’t view your arguments against it as strong), you still haven’t demonstrated they don’t/can’t have them. In my opinion, the most defensible conclusion regarding whether AIs have or could have consciousness/intentionality is one of agnosticism - nobody really knows, and anyone who thinks they know is probably mistaken > I'm not an expert in synthetic biology but from what I've seen their initial stock always consists of existing biological matter and viral recombinators which are often produced in vats full of pre-existing living organisms like e. coli. I think what you are saying is roughly right as to the current state of the discipline. But cellular life is just a complex chemical system, and there is no reason in principle why we couldn’t assemble it from scratch out of non-living components (such as a set of simple feedstock chemicals produced in chemical plants using non-biological processes). We don’t have the technology to do that yet but there is no reason in principle why we couldn’t eventually develop it. If you believe in abiogenesis, biological life was produced out of lifeless chemicals through random processes, and there is no reason in principle why we wouldn’t be able to repeat that in a laboratory, except that (one expects) by guiding the process instead of leaving it purely random, one might execute it in a human-scale timeframe, instead of the many millions of years it likely actually took. That’s the thing - if abiogenesis is true, there is no reason in principle why humans couldn’t artificially synthesise genuinely living things - at least primitive microbial life - out of simple chemical compounds (water, ammonia, methane, etc) - without relying on any non-human lifeforms in the process. Your claims that there is some kind of hard boundary of “irreducible complexity” between the biological and the inorganic only make sense given a framework that rejects abiogenesis (such as theistic creationism) |