>
> The human mind, being a part of the Universe, is bounded by the laws
> of science, both known and unknown. That makes it an extremely
> complicated machine, one we do not fully understand, but a machine
> nonetheless. That does not mean though that because we do not
> currently understand how it operates we will not one day be able to
> create an accurate replica, or something completely different that
> would meet any criteria of sentience.
==============
There's not a shred of evidence that we need to metaphorize ourselves as machines [although I'm not against such a metaphor]. But why don't we spend more time thinking of ourselves as, say, ecosystems, or musical pieces of space-time, or food for microbes.....We can choose what kinds of self-description/self-ascription we want to learn about each other with and it seems that the machinic-algorithmic description, which is largely a white male lab coat model, has an enormous set of limitations that come with it.
Maybe we should just ditch the whole AI approach and think of how we can use our cognitive prostheses [metaphor alert] to reorganize the political ecology-economy that currently exists? The nineties gave us bogus techno-libertarianism with a preposterous asset price bubble and computer controlled Wal-Mart tyrannical supply chains that exploit millions across time and space. Surely we can do better than that with our machines, starting with thinking about them as parts of the larger ecology.
What happens to our washing machines, cars, computers and the like when they die? How many of us that aren't members of the Silicon Valley Toxics Coalition really know? What can we do to deal with this problem? How do we put computers to work for us so that we can get millions the health care they need? Yada Yada. These seem to me to be more important questions than whether we can reverse engineer the capabilities of what is/was the Cartesian model of cognition. It is the questions that need changing and we'll change ourselves and each other in the process.......
Evolution *just is* intelligence testing.
Ian