Peterkin

That is, with members of own species, which is hit-and-miss - judging by the history of our species. With members of species we have co-opted it works a little more reliably, since the relationship of subject and interlocutor tends to be one-to-one, rather than mass-to-mass. With members of species with which we have no common language more recent than, say 50,000,000 years, it's subjective. Any genera beyond that evolutionary crotch, we tend to objectify categorically. But degree of realishness and sanishness doesn't get us a definition of 'self' or 'awareness', let alone the combination of the two. I wasn't questioning its validity; I'm questioning whether it's sufficiently informative.

That, I conjecture, is because you start from an anthropocentric definition of self-awareness. It keeps coming back to that: we can only have our perspective. Many things can be said, and even sound profound, if not entirely plausible, as long as you don't put too fine a point on the meaning of words.

Perennially fascinating to philosophers, psychologists, neurologists and biologists since forever, I guess. We just can't stop touching that yellow dot on our forehead.

The molecular models are available, too, and look better than mine did. The springs all got lost eventually, so you could only make the stiff dowel connections. There is quite an amusing building toy of magnetic bricks, Hot wheels makes some car kits and there are over-coloured plastic thingies for the very young. But the market does seem heavily dominated - colonized, infested, overrun - by Lego products of every kinds of speciality. I had a set of building blocks that came in square, oblong, triangle, cylinder, arch and semicircle, each piece small enough for four-year-old hands. They were smooth and unpainted, restful to look at, a pleasure to touch. You can still get them, and other construction toys made of wood, but they're really expensive. I made a set for a grandchild some years ago, but she preferred the large Duplos from which you can make tall structures and knock them over with a big crash. (Imagine the melodrama of her teens! You know how wish upon your children the kind of children they were? I got my wish.)

I'm not obsessed with 'optics'.

Meccanos, yes! They were my brother's. Little strips of metal under every rug and sofa cushion. My favourite was Tinkertoy when younger, then the molecular model kit and the Visible series. https://americanhistory.si.edu/collections/search/object/nmah_214319

Whatever for?

Somebody seems to be in something.... It's a pattern-recognition problem, not an optical one; optics are changed by snip-and-tuck.

Sorry! Forgot to put in irony brackets.

That's true, but it limits us to the species with which we can communicate - for most people, that's just other people, pets and computers. For species with whom we have no common language, we can usually read body language: if the subject is trying to run away from you, bite your hand or steal your shiny cufflink, it's aware. If it just stands there and shows no response to being kicked, it's probably unconscious. But, yes, on the whole, that's the only convincing test: ask them.

They're not mutually exclusive. Dictators hold elections all the time. Their elections are rigged. That could never, ever happen in the United States of America, could it? So it's okay for the judiciary to be political, right?

To the extent that we each understand ourselves.

I have a problem with the premise of this question. Who does the testing? By what means have you determined that you are the agent capable of judging whether other entities are conscious? You must have started with an presumption that you yourself are conscious - without having passed any tests or posited any standards of qualification - and have thereby also become the sole authority on the subject of consciousness. (IOW: I am the alpha and the omega) In fact, all you can do, with no matter how sophisticated or wily a test, is compare others to your own currently perceived state of consciousness.

No, i did not say that. That, minus the gratuitous bracketed bit, is a fragment of what i did say. And there you have the whole problem of optics as produced by partisan kaleidoscopes. Going around a twenty-seventh time won't make it any different.

Unless you read the rest of the post, maybe.... I It did.

In that case, you can create a race of mad robots. Might not be a good idea, though!

BTW One court appointment, or one cabinet appointment, doesn't constitute discrimination against all those who were not appointed. If an entire identifiable group is absent from both court and cabinet, one has cause to question whether the reason is systemic discrimination. Each appointment has to come from one group and no other. If every group but one is considered, it's probably discrimination. If only one group is considered, it's certainly discrimination. It the makeup of the body as a whole does not closely reflect the proportions in the general population, there can be many reasons, and these can be discovered with due diligence; a fair judgment can be brought, and possibly suggestion for improving the balance can be suggested. Like, say: "Why not appoint a Black Woman to the Supreme Court?" "All right, if the judiciary committee agrees, I will." Something like that could happen.

It wasn't the judges who complained. It never is; it's usually somebody entirely outside the judiciary, who has no idea how to assess qualifications or relative positions of power, or even the constitutional stance of candidates. There is no shortage of self-appointed spokesmen to howl foul on behalf of the poor downtrodden privileged.

In my lay opinion: evolution. They actually were made in the image of their creator - in an [incomplete] image that creator had of one of its own functions in isolation from all other processes taking place in its complex organism. That creator did not build in all the mistakes and blind alleys nature had, because this creation actually was purposeful. I have to say: Nothing, because I can't raise a valid argument against something I don't fully understand. I followed it up to the rock in the pool. I have no problem with machines doing every logical and intelligent procedure of which humans - even if only a few exceptionally clever humans - are capable. What I can't see machines duplicating is passion, impulse, instinct, stupidity and craziness. I'm sure they could fake it, or be duped into acting on false information, but genuine craziness is an animal thing, a primeval thing. You can program in bugs and glitches, but I don't think you can program in the random replication errors that result in new strains of organic behaviour. I suppose the main difference is: machines can never be accidental or non-purposeful. Here is an example of fuzzy English: 'having a purpose. Animals do have a purpose for their actions, which they don't always carry out rationally, while machines exist on purpose, for the purpose of carrying out rational actions. It's the difference between ID and abiogenesis.

I already answered that. You are not an image of your image. What are the unrealized tasks of human intelligence? Are any of them not being served? Possibly. I don't know what they are, so I can only speculate on speculations, as it were. Can we ever know the meaning of the universe, life and everything? Probably not (because it probably hasn't got any; the pattern-seeking mind has chased a series of random events up an unpatterned tree, and will never stop barking.) Again, I would expect so, just because it's man-made and thus constrained by human logic, rather than free to respond to the vagaries of nature and the pressures of survival. But even if it mimics all of human intelligence, it can't really do human stupidity convincingly; doesn't have human yearnings and irrational desires; doesn't fly into hormone-induced rages and make sentimental choices. A mimic is still just an image. If AI become sentient in its own right, it will stop mimicking humans. The self-aware android will not wish above all things to be a real live boy - he will strive to be the best possible android. Maybe the real live boys will mimic him. Yes. I don't think human intelligence is fundamentally different from rodent intelligence, but is fundamentally different from adding machines of any level of sophistication. I would not know a quantum entanglement or the mathematical proofs if I fell over them on the towpath. I have an ordinary monkey brain. It didn't switch. Nothing was ever switched in evolution. Things were added, things were enlarged, adapted, co-opted, extended, folded over, crossed over, passed over, reversed, stapled, spindled and mutilated, but nothing is ever discarded to be replaced by some whole new thing. Computation is just a new trick learned by an old pony - probably as an extension of speed and distance calculation for running down prey and running away from predators.

Did it make money? More interesting [to humans] and understandable [to humans] just means that the discussion is limited to the 'intelligent' functions that matter to only one species out of 8 million, and have meaning to only one species out of 8 million and that - just so happen! - to have been invented by that very same species. There is a dot on your forehead. The machine you programmed thinks the way you do; therefore that intelligence must be a mirror image of yours. But not the other way around.

Why human? There are more overlaps between a computer's functions and human intelligence's functions, because humans made computers as an extension of their own intelligence. A computer is just more human computing capability. It can't do much for a moth or salamander or an orangutan, because thy don't want operations performed that their own little organic brains can't perform. Humans need computer augmentation because their big organic brains are already performing operations they want performed, but just not enough per second.

It would depend on the judge, the crime, the accusation, the evidence, the basis on which the judge freed or reversed a previous decision (It matters which, and judges don't have the authority to pardon) and whether a fair trial was conducted in the first place. Since every judge is one in thousands and every judge has to make decisions that nobody else makes, I don't understand the number reference. There is a process which is intended to deliver justice, and more or less effectively designed to be able to deliver justice, and then there is a political and economic system in which that process is supposed to work, and in which there factors that contribute to and factors that detract from the effectiveness of the process. So, if you want to ask whether a particular decision is fair, you have to supply more details. If the question is about some other aspect of the situation, perhaps you can clarify.

The vast majority of organic brains on this planet can't perform any of those sophisticated mathematical feats; in this, the dumbest computer beats the smartest rat. That's why i don't think the analogy is useful. My brain doesn't understand the machine's workings, but understand the rat's perfectly - us organics together.

They can compare things, count things, record things, even juxtapose things to make new things. I guess that meas they can sort of think - at least about what they're told to think about - and evaluate things - according to preset values. They can be hooked up to devices that monitor external processes and conditions: measure temperature and raise or lower the thermostat accordingly; measure pressure, etc. I'm pretty sure a computer can't tell what part of your leg to scratch or whether you've fallen in love. I guess that's a windy way of repeating: no, a computer can't decide what to measure, and an organic brain, even one as small as a frog's, can. I think the comparison breaks down at several points. The sensory input is personal to the brain; literally a matter of life and death; to the computer, it's just another equation to solve. Emotional response and volition, afaik, are still well beyond the mechanical range of functions: it can make rational decisions, if it's given sufficient information on which to base one; it won't do anything instinctively, or little or no data.