a thoughtful web.
Good ideas and conversation. No ads, no tracking.   Login or Take a Tour!
comment
kleinbl00  ·  296 days ago  ·  link  ·    ·  parent  ·  post: You Are Not a Parrot

    To my mind

Philosopher walks into a bar. Says to the bartender "I have a proposal for you. I will stand in the middle of the bar with a full glass of beer. Whenever someone says 'drink' I will take a sip. I will then walk halfway to the wall. I will pay you for the first glass of beer if you pay to keep my glass full."

Bartender says "oh no you don't, pesky philosopher! For I am an educated man and I have learned that if you walk halfway towards something with every step you will only approach it asymptotically and never truly reach it and I am far too clever to provide you with endless beer!"

An engineer, deep in his cups, says "Charge him for three beers." The bartender and philosopher both turn to him, annoyed, because engineers exist to annoy everyone.

"This room is what, forty feet? He's gonna go about twenty the first time, about ten the second time, about five the third time, about two and a half the fourth time, about a foot and change the fifth time, about six inches the sixth time and by the seventh time he won't be able to raise his glass without touching the wall."

The engineer then raises his hand to quell the objections of the educated. "Yeah yeah yeah, shut up. He's a drunk, he's already wobbly on his feet, he can't stand up straight to within half an inch, he's got eight sips between the middle of the room and the wall unless his sips are truly heroic he's going to have a hell of a time drinking more than a pint before his nose brushes."

The philosopher changes the subject to the qualia of color and the engineer grumbles 'fucking green" into his beer.

__________________________________________________________________________

This is not a philosophical problem. It is an engineering problem. It is an engineering problem by virtue of it being proposed, investigated and executed by engineers. There are metrics. There are boundary conditions. There is data. The way to answer "do machines have souls" is to define "soul", not take your existing data and using it as an argument to neutralize the humanity of humans.

Am I alive? yes.

Are you alive? yes.

Are bugs alive? yes.

Is software alive? No. Not by any definition we have ever used. Ever. In the history of life on earth.

If your interaction on this topic is not shallow, there's no controversy at all. None. QED, if your conclusions are different than the experts, your conclusions are wrong.