Hi all! Thank you for these articles. As it turns out, a colleague and I have been discussing AI lately too, which got me reading Asimov, and my colleague discovering that you can make a pretty good living at this, because folks are looking for forward thinkers in this field. Have you read Pentti Haikonen's work? My brief comment stems in part from that.

My feeling about intelligence (artificial or natural) is that we overrate it. Our idea of conscious awareness is still way too mental. We have trouble believing in things that differ from our own narrative experience (which, by the by, we can do by reading and imagining we are living it). We look at ants as mechanical (which is way wrong if you study ants). That's why we have no trouble thinking you can breathe life into an otherwise lifeless machine. We don't think much of flesh or biological matter, unless it's intelligent. As a former programmer, and a brief researcher of Siri's creator (simulating human language), my take is a lot different... intelligence is more of a side effect or afteraffect of life - and has little to do with a living organism (also see Libet's work - the mind is the last to know). A living thing can't be a bunch of thoughts or a program observing its life, because it's alive in every cell, and in every inch of each cell too. This may be helpful:

http://thebrain.mcgill.ca/flash/a/a_12/a_12_m/a_12_m_con/a_12_m_con.html

But even beyond that, consciousness does not arise in the nervous system, let alone in the brain. Sit in on a few neuronal dynamics sessions and you may be surprised. Neurons are only specialized cells. Mental activity is not awareness. Life and awareness begin way way down, and the brain is so far removed from life it makes atrocious decisions that cost millions of lives as though they don't matter. Living things don't do that. Limbs care whether they survive. Cells care (just read Hubel and Wiesel more carefully). They are in a struggle for existence. They are not apathetic parts of a mental mechanism that do not mind being lopped off and swapped in and out to extend the mental story.

The mind is a weird sort of thing that decides it can live without its limbs or even its entire body (until it finds out it can't). Societies do that too, treating their populaces and living individuals like sacrificial limbs (hence my attraction to the JH!). Look into Olaf Blanke's work. Some more folks to read are ER John (John, E. R. (2003). A Theory of Consciousness. Current Directions in Psychological Science , 12(6), 244-250. doi:10.1046/j.0963-7214.2003.01271.x) and these guys (https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/23397797) which stems from Lynn Margulis' work.

An artificial being whose every element is not desperate to survive will never act like us. Because every bit of us cares about staying alive, not just the brain. We should not worry about giving robots too much power or acting too much like us. We should worry about becoming less and less like us - our growing apathy for our biological planet and our organic underpinnings. That is who we are... once they are gone, we will not realize we are extinct too. Information is not life, because life doesn't treat anything that helps it realize it's here like "knowledge" alone - more like a companion it cannot imagine losing.
--Lonny

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