[Tichy]

"But to date, nobody has designed a machine that on its own decide to go and do anything at all."

That's simply not true. For example the Google bot decides every seconds if it wants to crawl this website or another one. I don't think you are up to date - might want to read up on "autonomous robotics". Many of the algorithms are so in nature that humans can not predict their results.

I think if you talk to robot builders they will tell you that the robots do stuff they weren't told to do all the time.

As for motivation, I don't think it is as magical as you presume it to be. We are not motivated to do arbitrary things - nature has motivated us to do certain things (think, learn, reproduce). So if we motivate a computer to do certain things (like crawl web site), why should it not count?

[jacquesm]

Whether we have the mental capability to simulate any amount of computer time does not mean that the algorithms are not deterministic in nature and that they could be simulated and computed by any turing capable machine, including the human brain. It might take a while, but that's the only difference.

Anyway, I can see I am not going to be able to convince you of this and it is getting late so I cede to you.

But thank you for the interesting exchange.