I'm going back through some of this because it really has been excellent for me.

•I don't quite understand your answer to my question. I assume that you did intend to answer the question, and I infer therefore that your discussions of whether a given mechanical system is intelligent, or whether it's conscious, are in some way related to my question about whether it's a person. My working theory is that you're treating "is conscious" and "is a person" as roughly synonymous, and that you're treating "intelligence" as distinct from both of those. Given those assumptions, I infer that you agree with me that it's possible in principle for X to be a person if X is, for example, a program running on a computer. (I'm not certain of this. Come to that, I'm not certain that you intended to answer the question at all.) You also seem to be saying that you don't know what evidence would convince you that such a system really was a person, though you know that no test conduct you could conduct in as little as a few centuries could provide such evidence. Have I understood that correctly?

I may have answered in other places, but Indeed, I do wish to answer your questions.

I absolutely do believe that a consciousness with intelligence could be implemented in a means other than the methods nature already uses, zygotes for instance. I don't know that it can be done in silicon but it seems very unlikely to me that consciousness or intelligence should favor low-speed ionic transfers over high speed electronic transfers for signalling and processing. I can't rule it out, there may be something important about the energy and time scales of neuron processes that cause features we do not yet understand to emerge that would be hard to capture in silicon and high speed electronics, I simply don't know. I would also think that those features, once understood, would be implementable in silicon, although we might find the performance of silicon was very inferior to the neurochemical system we have now, I just don't know.

I don't rule out that there is some other physics of consciousness, or physics related to consciousness out there. I don't see that we have any clue yet whether there is or not. By metaphor, I think or Marie Curie seeing the glow of the radium. Oooooh.... pretty lights. Bummer that it came with "invisible" high energy particles that ripped through our cells like tiny hellfire missles, killing Marie and others until it was understood better. We see the glow of consciousness and think it is pretty. We have no idea what might be going on to make it so. By appeal to other thinkers on the subject, Penrose is the smartest (in my opinion) who have hypothesized the secret sauce of consciousness might somehow be in quantum coherence, in the wave function. What if the wave function collapses are the atom of conscious choice in the universe? What if the brain is like a nuclear reactor, a 3 pound containment vessel whos real claim to fame is bringing together 3 nanograms net of wavefunctions to cohere and collapse together in beautiful patterns, and that this is us? Of course Penrose didn't get quite that ooky about it, but I submit this is the motivation. And if it isn't wavefunctions, the idea is that it might be something. Consciousness is something different from everything else we explain in physics. Why shouldn't it be the glow of something that we have not yet understood?

So I cannot rule out that a program running on a computer gets you consciousness. I don't know that it will be sufficient either. I thought the IBM computer "Watson" playing Jeopardy was pretty intriguing. It certainly advances the boundaries of the kinds of things we know we can do with machines that might previously have been thought to require humans. But I also really saw, (I think), a difference in how Watson answered questions than how a human does. Watson't right answers were hard to distinguish from a human's. But Watson's wrong answers were typically very stupid, I thought. I don't know if this is resolved by accretion of more and better algorithms and code, or if it is because the lights are on, but nobody is home.

When I say it would take a few centuries that is almost certainly more than it would actually take. I would expect probably a few years. The thing is, on the one hand I am pretty convinced that you are conscious because you feel that way to me in your responses, but I have a higher level of confidence with you than with anybody else on this site that i haven't met in person. On the other hand I think my dog is conscious and I am well aware that humans are built to "bond" with other creatures that show a broad range of characteristics, and that mammals in general havea lot of those characteristics and that dogs in particular have evolved to exploit that identification.
I really do take the question "how do I KNOW that everybody else is real" seriously.

I do treat conscious and is a person as close to identical. I do tend to think intelligence is essential, but I'm not sure how much is essential (dogs seem to be people-ish to me), and I don't think it is even close to the thing that will limit silicon from seeming like (or being, and no, I don't know what the difference is between seeming like and being is) a person. I think consciousness will be hard part. I already know the human mind is a bunch of black boxes, I know this from having watched my mother after her stroke. Initially she was having a very hard time speaking intelligently and I could see her frustration. About 5 minutes in to her first conversation with us after the stroke she turned to me and sais "I'm aphasic." Oh my god! I was so glad to hear that! As opposed to lights on but nobody's home (i.e. she was gone) it was a case of someone is home but the windows are filthy. So much of what our mind does it does outside of our consciousness, even something as personal-seeming as language! And yet, consciousness SEEMS to sit at the top of all of this controlling all the cool black boxes it is given.

I don't always answer each question and bullet point because i disrespect you or don't understand, and certainly not because I am a crackpot. When I do skate around the stuff it is because I am trying to pursue a line closer to what I suppose the questions really are. I don't KNOW ahead of time what the questions really are, I develop them as part of the discussion. Hmmmm. Maybe I'm the consciousness simulation which isn't real :)