friendlyskies:
So, a person in the last stages of a wasting disease, who can no longer move or speak, is not sentient?
A person who can no longer move or speak, yet is not brain-dead, is sentient.
How about a tree? It doesn't experience the world in the same way you do, but you know for certain that it can't possibly be sentient? How?
Trees are alive, but not sentient. If you don't get why, research qualia and sentience, then come back with an idea of what sentience is.
The whole point of the sources I've linked to is that the Google search is no longer rational, that's why all these professors and engineers and think tankers are hypothesizing that Google might be conscious.
Consciousness (and sentience, the two are at risk of becoming confused here) is not a product of (rational or irrational) thought processes alone. A conscious being experiences the world in so many more ways than just through the cognitive "mind". That's what Sri and I are saying.
For being such an anti-religion type, you sure seem to be completely influenced by the western religious mind-set and can't seem to think outside of the box that your pagan / popish conceptions of metaphysics and reductionism place you in. Everything you say unquestioningly assumes or incorporates basic scholastic stances like mind / body dualism, rationalism, material determinism, Augustinianism, Aristotilianism, theological ontology, etc. We are agreed that this worldview is distorted and can even be dangerous, but you don't seem to realise how much you fall into the same mind-set yourself.
It may well have had a religious experience; how would you know? Because Google Search hasn't changed "people, cultures, and life itself"?
A religious experience would be if the experience of google (which undoubtedly has changed people, cultures and life itself..... so you can stop setting up straw men and trying to put words in my mouth dear) led people (or other sentient beings) to an insight into the nature of being through intuitive faith in the experience / contemplation of google. Google itself is not sentient and cannot have a religious experience, at least not yet or in the near future.
I mean, whatever. I don't know either. I "feel" that there's a ghost in the machine.
If the contemplation of this "ghost" can lead to your nous achieving an comprehensive insight into the nature of being, than you will have undergone an illogical, irrational and scientifically unverifiable experience, that may change your worldview in a radical fashion. Then, for all intents and purposes you have another god / religion to deal with. Then the papists can tell you why your god is wrong and the "hip" atheist types can call you an idiot for believing in irrational nonsense, and the board will come full circle.
But I don't know. Neither do you all, though,
Nobody can ever definitively "know" anything. Science itself doesn't claim to to know anything. However, I can justify a belief that google does not meet the criteria for sentience that makes much more sense than a "ghost" in the machine. However, if your belief in the "ghost" is real, strong and a product of your experience with it in the world; Then that belief is just as important, or even more important to your reality as any scientific "truth" can be, and I will respect it as such. And that was basically the thesis of my argument.