I'm also a fan of ants. They have agriculture. They farm in their underground cities! They keep livestock too; insect livestock, but still! They give them medicines when they get sick, specially cultivated fungus for example. They are so cool.
Neosocial insects like ants are amazing indeed. I often wonder what kind of "mind" an anthill has. Hurts just to think about it.
And, to quote Oliver Sachs: "I'm not sure about octopuses..."
I find it very fun to think about and have been called wierd for taking about ants before with childlike excitement.
The AntsCanada channel is fun for watching ecosystems interact with each other. So fascinating. :)
I thought this quote was about the octopus that correctly predicted the outcome of games in a FIFA world cup. But seems it was something else?
It's a fascinating discussion with a lot of my favourite mid-late 20th century thinkers. It's up on youtube, lookup any of the names involved with "roundtable discussion". It's over 3 hours long though.
Anyway, Oliver was talking about what kind of mind he imagined various animals having. And that was most of what he had to say on octopuses.
It's a bit of a sad watch too because all the participants except Dennet and Sheldrake are dead now.
And yet, most would agree that a cat can feel pain, but a machine can't. I think most people would object if the Google engineer said "I think this AI is every bit as sentient as a cat." They'd still say he's crazy.
I also wonder what would happen if that particular AI actually had logic to "observe its own thought processes and integrate them back into consciousness". Would we then just spin on the semantics, such as by arguing that this isn't really "observing" and it certainly isn't "consciousness"? (how can you define words like "consciousness" without using words or concepts like "sentience", bringing us back to square one?)
So I don't think meta-cognition is the answer either.
Is a self driving car aware of itself? Surely within its logic it represents itself as a vehicle, while also being able to logically represent other vehicles on the road. Its logic accounts for there being similarities (they both obey the same laws of physics and such) and differences (its logic controls its own behavior but not that of other vehicles). So it has a meaningful and useful concept of "self". All of this is required for it to be able to function.
What if some future iteration of a self driving car's vision system allows it to glean useful information from reflections, such as off of store windows? If it correctly can identify a reflection of itself as being itself... well then it has passed the mirror test. But that is a pretty silly thing to assign too much meaning to.
I just don't see "awareness of self" as being meaningful. It doesn't narrow down the definition at all.