Re:Fifty or Sixty Years of Processor Development for This?
by mcguire on Wednesday April 04, 2018 @02:14PM
(#16757372)
That "consciousness" is limited to "people" results in a very limiting definition of consciousness. At some point, it's probably better to at least pretend that something you regard as a non-person is conscious, if only in order to make reasonably accurate predictions about the world.
Thought is just a particular set of biochemical reactions occurring across particular kinds of biological systems (nervous systems).
When you get hungry, you start thinking of food. These thoughts are, literally, products of the innervation of your stomach.
I don't know what "thinking" is if computers are the kinds of things which can do it; I'd guess it would be nothing we are, in fact, doing.
Two pieces of glass may differ in size, but not in what makes them transparent. Two people may differ in all sorts of ways, but not in what makes them conscious.