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There's a fun short story about this topic in a book called "The Mind's I" [1] edited by Hofstadter and Dennett. Unfortunately the Internet Archive copy is loc
by rwmj 11mo ago
There's a fun short story about this topic in a book called "The Mind's I" [1] edited by Hofstadter and Dennett. Unfortunately the Internet Archive copy is locked and the cat is sitting on my lap so I can't grab my copy right now, but I think it's possibly "The Soul of Mark III Beast" by Terrel Miedaner.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Mind%27s_I https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Mind%27s_I
Update: Found a PDF: http://people.whitman.edu/~herbrawt/classes/339/Mark.pdf http://people.whitman.edu/~herbrawt/classes/339/Mark.pdf
- uberman 11mo agoCool I will check it out.
- rwmj 11mo agoBe warned that it's not deep philosophy, just a bit of fun! Edit: Reading it again now, I think the story stands up well, aside from its obvious 1970s-isms. If the story has any philosophical value today, it's that pretty soon we will actually build machines that behave like this (if it hasn't even been done already). And some of their owners will definitely treat them as sentient, even if obviously they are not. And at some point as the machines get better and better at this mimicry there'll be people demanding that laws are passed to protect them.
- uberman 11mo agoThe best short stories are just that!