[Skybird]

Add to machine intelligence a neural network. A real one. Think of self-emerging structures, and dissipative structures (Chaos theory). We do not know when intelligence becomes self-aware. We do not even know if we are...! Neural research has undergone a unnoticed revolution in the past 25 years or so. There is strong findings indicating that what we consider to be our free will or our decision, indeed is determined by the brain in basis of purely neural/hormonal events that make the body go feeling blue and sad, and THEN the activity in the brain regions start that tell the EEG and its interpreter that we are sad and therefor we cry. The body very well decides our physiological action - and THEN we/our brain react to it by adding an interpretation to it: we feel "sad". Thats is no hokuspokus, I already learned that to be object of intense debate when I had courses in psychophysiology in the early nineties. Since then, the evidence has massively shifted in support of the biologistic theories here. Its very hard to get by these strong findings. When I said neural science and brain research has seen a revolution in the past 20 years, comparable to quantum theory in physics, it is no exaggeration. The results just point at a direction that we do not like.

Our idea of having a free will - may be just our illusion to make our life more bearable by giving us comfort to find in the belief that we are somewhat masters of our fate in this totally uncertain universe and can decide our future. But maybe we get decided on a much more profound, deeper, inner, biologic level.

That relatives quite a lot of what we think may set us apart from a machine-based artificial intelligence.

If this machinery then starts to build itself, expand itself, creates doubles or improved versions of itself, and spreads, we then have to ask the question where dead machinery ends, and life begins. Or we would need to revise our concept of what our, what biological life makes so - as we think - unique and different to machinery.

I find these to be most uncomfortable questions. Its far more easier and enjoyable to avoid them and just believe in any surrogate, trawman conception.

When cosmological theories today claim that from nothingness can emerge, even must emerge material existence, all by itself, and when we see structures forming up by themselves unpredictably when systems see their cohesive status reaching a certain amount of instability, we cannot be sure that we can guess in advance when the treshold for the emerging of "mind" is reached and overstepped in a given process of system-related evolution.

I would not even rule out with all certainty that maybe it already is there, and we are just not aware of its presence. May be that we cannot see it then. May be that it hides from us intentionally. But if that would be true, then we would indeed be completely at its mercy. To me, this is the most unpleasant scenario of all imaginable.