I was advocating AI convos because they can give "depth of knowledge" and "varied perspectives" that do come from people and/or are combined using logic into what may seem to be novel statements. But the source they were trained on is the words of people. And you can learn a lot about what a lot of different people are talking about online by chatting with AI. It's just a convenient way to get a feel for the zeitgeist with more exposure to more humans in a much shorter time than it would take to chat with many many people.

I'll check out the Dr's experiment that you mentioned. Thank you!

no known mechanism

There's also no known mechanism for what happened before/at the big bang, but that doesn't mean God did it, where "it" refers to everything in the world we see after the big bang. To me, it's "we do not know" and I'm perfectly happy with that answer. I don't rush to say, well it must have been this thing, just because I can't imagine how it is this other thing, when in fact it could be some third thing not yet discovered.

Single celled creatures can implement a state machine that can learn to change some of it's state changes over time. Probably due to natural selection by the environment, where a random different state change happened to work better there. Brains observe other parts of itself, not sure if cells do, but maybe. Maybe cells and brains are both conscious, just at different scales and with brains having more advanced properties. Much like a drop of water and an ocean have some properties in common but the ocean having more.

Ya, AI is not conscious like we are, that I agree with! Although it may be able to simulate it, now or soon.

I'm glad we had this interaction. Thanks for your thoughts. They are valid. We may differ but I won't use words like Right or Wrong. I'll admit to not knowing for sure. It could be like the blind folks touching the elephant where they're all kind of right, just touching different parts of it.

Happy weekend!

!ALIVE !BBH !UNI !PIZZA !LADY