Sorry for the delayed reply; I was out of town over the weekend. I hope it's not too late to address a few of the points in your responses.
I speak of a machine in its generic sense; As a contrivance to help us do work. Don't take me wrong, but I love science fiction; especially Frank Herbert novels.
I already responded to this, but it occurred to me only later that we may have had a miscommunication here.
The Selfish Gene is not a science fiction novel; it is a nonfiction book about evolutionary biology by Richard Dawkins, an Oxford zoologist. The main point of the book is that evolution is in most cases best explained in terms of the differential reproduction of genes, not organisms, and that organisms are best viewed as "survival machines" developed by natural selection for the purpose of protecting the genes and facilitating their reproduction. In one of the book's better known passages, Dawkins writes:
Now [the genes] swarm in huge colonies, safe inside gigantic lumbering robots, sealed off from the outside world, communicating with it by tortuous indirect routes, manipulating it by remote control. They are in you and in me; they created us, body and mind; and their preservation is the ultimate rationale for our existence.
Thus, in Dawkins's view, and the view of at least a fair number of modern evolutionary biologists, organisms are literally living machines developed for the purpose of protecting the self-replicating genes that created them; this was the point of my post to whicn you responded above.
So I won't say it's impossible, I'll just say it's improbable. If it takes millions of years for a biological machine to gain consciousness, then I will agree it will take millions of years for our machines.
You're overlooking the vitally important fact that, unlike biological intelligence, artificial intelligence will be created by an intelligent designer (or, actually, a large number of intelligent designers working toward a common goal) rather than by the blind process of natural selection. The effect of consciousness that took nature billions of years to achieve can certainly be achieved much more quickly by an intelligent agent with the power of foresight. I haven't the expertise to make an informed judgment as to how soon we might expect to achieve bona fide artificial consciousness, but I wouldn't be surprised to see it in our lifetime (assuming that technology progresses at the present rate), and certainly do not expect it to take millions of years.
Ok. You're way over my head now. I only reduce the problem to it's basic level due to my limited knowledge. I'm ignorant enough to think that hunks of metal can't reason. That's all.
We're all ignorant of a great many things, but ignorance and sarcasm are not a defense when maintaining a discredited view. Your point here seems to be that the idea of consciousness emerging from the exchange of electrical signals between microchips seems counterintuitive and implausible. Is it any more intuitive or plausible that consciousness could emerge from the exchange of electrical signals between hunks of protein and water? Science has long since established that it does.
