Thoughts about machine life:

Humans are primarily sentient and sapient creatures with some smaller 5% or so capability for salience and something between 0% and 1% capability for sublimation.

Machines have for the last 50 or so years been highly sentient and salient creations with practically no sapience and no sublimation at all.

When a person writes a book like "Digital Consciousness", the author is displaying a much higher degree of sublimation than we have seen in centuries. Sublimation is being able to solve problems and present truth derived from only disconnected and incoherent evidence ... yet perfectly correct.

As we begin to add sapience to machine programming, we will increase the machines ability for sublimation. In mathematical terms ∞ is the symbol for universal infinity. It means the infinite nature of this universe. Yet this universe is only a construct. All that there is ("ATTI") infinity has a different symbol that I am inventing right now. I like the section symbol ("§"). It is a sort of Ying and Yang reaching from the top and bottom yet conforming to a circle that can loop forever. It is also the symbol for the sublime. When humans begin to surpass even 1% § we are finally becoming more conscious by accessing more of the consciousness around us. Sublimation is how we find the capability to program machine life.

Looking at these two posts, I probably should include the definitions for sentience, salience, sapience, and sublimation.

Sentience: TV and movies always misuse the word "sentient" - it does not mean to be self-aware. It simply means to be able to "sense" things. Machines have "sensors" and are actually quite good at that. Machines with sensors can do all sorts of things, like even driving cars without a human operator.

Salience: More than sensing, an ability to actually be "aware" is more what we mean when we say "self aware." A salient creature can compare and categorize the input it receives through receptors. It requires a subjective hierarchy because of the "ineffable" nature of the qualitative universe. There is no way to define, for example, the "Redness" of a strawberry. We know the approximately 640-700 nm wavelength of light causes the color red, but to actually define what a person "sees" in the mind - is impossible. If a person grew up seeing in their mind what you would call "blue" every time they saw red, and saw it that way consistently, well then they would always call that red, and you would have no way to tell if they really saw it the same way you do. That ability to categorize something like that is itself a miracle of the universe.

Sapience: Then more than being aware, we need to be able to apply what we gathered with our sensors and organized with our salience, and be able to apply it to a similar (but not same) situation. This is ingenuity and creativity and those things that give a person wisdom.

Sublimation: When we can piece together disjointed clues from many different sources and with many parts of the puzzle missing and still fill in the answers, we have begun to conquer the sublime. This is the highest level of awareness that humans possess only a tiny amount of what is available.

These "4 Ss" together are what truly makes us conscious. IMO

Really?

I think you do know more about this. I am hoping your input can help move this along a little further. The fact that your reply (above) immediately turned to "general intelligence/creativity/awareness" tells me that you understand the difference between "Narrow AI" which is basically "programming tasks" and General AI which could perhaps be referred to as "programming awareness."

A fairly renown British philosopher named Colin McGinn who teaches at the University of Miami once postulated that humans are incapable of defining sentience; that the mind is incapable of comprehending itself entirely, and that this incapacity has primarily occupied most of Western philosophy since Descartes. When you stop and think, it is not too difficult to arrive at the same logical conclusion yourself when you undertake the task to describe what a "conscious observation" actually is.

I like the analogy of trying to explain what "redness" actually is in the mind (see video linked below). If you took a person who saw in his/her mind what you might see in your mind as "Blue" every time they saw "Red" -- wouldn't they still call it "Red?" This is because EVERY time they saw "RED" they would see it in their mind as "Blue" but for some reason since everyone around them always called it "Red" -- they too would also call it "Red."

Therefore, this special "quality" of "Redness" that makes the mind observe something as "Red" actually has no meaning or description for what it actually is. We know that instruments can read a spectrum analysis of 630-700 nm wavelength. But this behavior or "undefinable act" of what a person actually observes as "Red" is called "ineffible" (or too discrete to be described with words). The ineffible thing that is this special discernment of the quality of something is called "qualia."

http://non-virtual.com/index2.html

This is good. No matter what the person sees, the instrument "spectrometer" or "spectrophotometer" will register the "red" apple to be reflecting the "red" wave lengths. This is what we would all call the 'objective reality" or physical. But even if the "Redness" exists, there is no way to define what it is the mind sees. That undefinable aspect of all observation is the "qualia" (or at least that is the theory as I understand it). Qualia is "experiencing" life. The "experiencing" part is — what we have been unable to define.

I think we are getting there though. Books like the "Universe Solved" and "Digital Consciousness" are pushing the envelope on the "subliminal" capabilities of the human mind. We hypothesize that consciousness actually exists outside the mind. Consciousness is the only connection to the universe and it IS the universe. We simply accept that there is no 'physical" way for any two observers to see "redness" exactly the same way. At minimum and two observers, no matter how small, at least have to have a different viewpoint. Thus by very definition, the "observance" of "red" will never be absolute. We can then accept that the "redness" is only "redness" (a wavelength) and come to the understanding that we live in a programmed universe.