[Thursday @ May 10th 2007 11:27PM]

It is not the design of the computer I fault, it is the programing. There are quite a few other reasons that AI will never achieve sentience, but most of them involve quite a bit of symbolic logic. The simple truth is, the Human mind is unique, Socrates knew it, Plato knew it, Aristotle Knew it, Aquinas Knew it, Spinoza Knew it, and Descartes knew it. I can pile an infinite number of stones together, give it a jolt of electricity, and they will never think. If they did, the whole would be more than the sum of it's parts. There is something else, something "other" that must be there. Observation tells us there is nothing "missing" from a dead body, but reason tells us there must be.
I could go one for pages about this, but I think I'll save it for a term paper.
~G

[Chuckles McGee @ May 10th 2007 11:44PM]

The human brain, though incredible, is nothing more than carbon, hydrogen and a few trace elements. That's a huge understatement, but nevertheless, there's nothing "magical" or unique about a brain- it obeys the same basic laws of mass, energy and follows the rules of physics, just like any other human organ. Complexity does not equate to an impossibility in terms of emulation, only a difficulty. And a whole can perform more than the sum of it's parts- a car perform something that tires, an engine and gas cannot do separately. And whether philosphers claim to "know" something is logically independent of whether or not the thing itself is true. Whether or not a hunk of "thinking" silicon has ethical rights is still entirely up for debate.