> The onus of proof is on you to explain how a highly idealized ANN has the same expressivity as a fly's wetware. I've made an argument - it's essentially a fu

> The onus of proof is on you to explain how a highly idealized ANN has the same expressivity as a fly's wetware. I've made an argument - it's essentially a functionalist one. The intelligent things insects do - object detection, maze navigation - are all things that ANNs are really good at. To put things in perspective: the reason that I don't think that ANNs are anywhere near as expressive as the human brain is that there are countless behaviours that humans perform that ANNs simply can't - generalizing to novel viewpoints in vision, for example. (Or if you want to go whole hog, natural language understanding.) AFAICT The same is not true of insects. To dissuade me, you'd have to specify an insect behaviour that ANNs are fundamentally unequipped to perform. I'm not an entomologist so I'm totally open to the possibility that there is one. I also imagine there is significant neural diversity within the insect kingdom - presumably some bugs are smarter than others, and maybe some of the bigger-brained ones can do stuff that would necessitate an explanation that invokes consciousness. But you have to tell me what it is.