> What is A.I.? What is sentience? What is consciousness? In the book "Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid", Douglass Hofstadter proposes that prior t

> What is A.I.? What is sentience? What is consciousness? In the book "Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid", Douglass Hofstadter proposes that prior to Einstein's death, someone scan the complete contents of Einstein's brain into a book. A secretary manages the book. To ask "Book Einstein" a question and get a response, the secretary flips through the pages of the book, following algorithms to process and update various values on the pages. This enables "Book Einstein" to answer any question exactly as real Einstein would, and even remember prior discussions and engange in banter and conversation. Is "Book Einstein" sentient? Conscious? When the secretary takes a long vacation, what happens to the sentience or consciousness? This thought experiment, and many others in that excellent and entertaining book, showed me that we are not even remotely close to even defining what we mean by sentience or consciousness, let alone recognizing it when we see it.