Quote Originally Posted by Ash View Post
Is an artificial leg a real leg? Only by a generous and very open definition of the word 'leg'. Maybe one day we'll build a leg that is identical to a real one.

We'd have to understand how our own consciousness works first before having a serious crack at that question. It's perhaps the best argument for some kind of metaphysics, or not if the conscious is just a combination of biochemistry and information processing. The human mind is amazing. The other night I dreamed I bought a battleship to live in. WTF?

I used to wonder at all these AI questions 30 years ago when I was dabbling with 'Expert Systems' and trying to write software that connected entities and attributes and sorted and processed them in exciting ways. Then I lost interest, which explains my cold scepticism perhaps. I regret that sometimes. At other times I don't, as I might have now been working for Google, Amazon, Facebook or some such bunch of evil sh*tcùnts.
Would a leg created out of human cells be a real leg?

You're talking like a dualist, which is basically a position of religiosity, yet you've spent much of this thread deriding religion.

Materialism dictates that consciousness originates in the mind. The mind is merely a data processing system. Ergo, AI is of course capable of developing consciousness.