Actually I think they _do_, right now, but at a very low level. I do not think that there is a difference in kind between intelligent behavior and less so, beyond the intelligent behavior being intelligent/ I agree with those of you who have stressed the differences due to the instantiation in electonics vs tissue, but this is like the difference between different species with different sensory ranges and capabilities.
By theway, I donk think that thinking makes for rights. It's sensing and, specifically, suffering -- not just physical suffering.
I don't know beans about how computers work, and don't know and don't really care if they ever get smart enough to have to worry about whether we should give them rights. The point of the analogy -- this is what Michael D doesn't see -- is what it tells us about _us_. Joanne thinks it tells us that we are degraded to mere mechanism. I think it tells us that we are fully part of the natural world, just a moderately intelligent bit of it. That is a view that people have been resisting tooth and claw since the dawn of the modern age.
jks
--- joanna bujes <jbujes at covad.net> wrote:
> Dwayne writes:
>
> "Well phrased and on-point criticisms of Searle's
> arguments are fine and necessary but do nothing to
> change the fundamentals: machines do not think."
>
> However, the more that human beings are reduced to
> the level of objects, the more likely they are to
> imagine that machines could think. You see,
> experientially, the gap between man and machine is
> shrinking.
>
> Joanna
>
>
>
>
> ___________________________________
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