I am not sure we are going to be able to understand each other. I find your thoughts to be completely missing a foundation that I'm thinking would be necessary

I am not sure we are going to be able to understand each other. I find your thoughts to be completely missing a foundation that I'm thinking would be necessary to understand what I'm saying. I don't mean to be rude ... Yes of course a single celled organisim is conscious. Exactly the way an amoeba is self aware is how an self-conscious intelligence system would need to be to pose any kind of threat: organized to find energy sources and metabolize, replicate, etc. I'll tell you: a single celled organism is way more self aware, and way more functionally complex than any computer or software - in fact it's orders of magnitude more complex of a machine. That's my point: solving problems that make a machine capable of producing intelligence that is sensible to you and I is not solving the and problems that make a machine like a single cell organism, which is to say vertically integrated from the atom upwards to be a self-sustaining, self propagating, energy trap. A self-aware human who is disabled and can't live without intervention of other humans, can't self-sustain without others and therefore will not pass the test of being able to self-sustain. It's a test, and so one failure isn't validation of hypothesis. It can still be a great test affairs fail a percentage of the time. In general we know that all self conscious organisms self-sustain, even social, super-organism ones that need each other to survive so a criteria for a self aware organism is that it be capable of self sustaining. We don't even have a good test for that yet. But a test that would fail a perfectly self-aware disabled human wouldn't be a good one. We could very well administer a Turing Test to an artificial consciousness, but my point is that it wouldn't be a very accurate test. A Turing Test only proves the accuracy of a facsimile of human intelligence. It proves nothing about self consciousness systems. An amoeba would fail it in an instant as would a parrot or dolphin - and if you tell me these organisms aren't self-aware and conscious then we are definitely not on the same page. I could be wrong. I'm absolutely interested in anyone who can make a convincing argument otherwise, however until then I'm pretty certain that no emerging conscious machine will happen by accident. Rather it would take a Manhattan project or greater to produce an artificial consciousness on par for sophistication with an amoeba. And we don't have much motive to attempt it either, so I'm doubting we will do it anytime soon.