There's also those experiments showing that people 'answer' simple questions (by pressing the right button) marginally before they consciously make the choice. I.e. at least when it comes to simple questions (it's too hard to replicate the tests with questions that have open or complex answers) we seem to work like machines, with our consciousness of our choice only arriving after we've actually acted on it.
Learning about those tests is still probably the single most offensive thing to my intrinsic experience and philosphy of the world - having your beliefs challenged and tested around the edges is good fun, but man it fucking sucks when something pops up and shows your most central goddamn assumptions don't even approximate the truth.
That might be just a habit. We are able to learn certain patterns with such a perfection, that we don't have to actually pay any/much attention to those actions. That is of course double-edged weapon. But this doesn't contradict high cognitive functions, free will, etc. But if we find out that what happens with EVERY information between input/output is just mechanical (even though very complex with huge amount of variables), we will be sure that humans are "nothing more" than remarkably complex machines... But come to think of it, it probably won't be much of a deal; average Joe won't give a fuck and religious people will come up with some excuses...
This too.
I don't really see it as technically impossible, but since the AIs are generally built for purpose why would anyone make them human-like?
So that when your country suffers from disproportionate population aging you can have robots take care of your elderly instead of letting filthy foreigners into your country to take care of them and be paid with government money. That's why Japan is so eagerly exploring robotics: better to build your own servants who listen to you than to import them and have them not be exactly what you want them to be.
Since we are in ME thread, Japs are doing something that could be compare to VI at best... Speaking even hypothetically about difference between something like VI and AI would require really nerdy and geeky dirty talk. And that, for me, doesn't fit this thread or even this site...
Those themes/topics are something really close to my heart and it pisses me off that basically only story-based RPG that deal with them (at tolerable level at least) is Mass Effect series. I would kill for some hardcore sci-fi without any juvenille shit. At least some part of ME are interesting in this regard...
The mechanical thing isn't really a problem - in fact, addressing the fact of humans being mechanical objects while experiencing the world as conscious beings (i.e. consciousness mattering to us, but not having any place in the mechanical universe) was the centrepiece of Kant's major works. It's a problem that predates neurology by centuries - modern neurology and psychiatry just fills in the 'how' of it, but for Kant and similarly inclined philosophers the problem was apparent as soon as Newtonian physics emerged. I.e. if the universe is constructed out of causal chains, then regardless of how the neurology and psychiatry of it play out, we're part of those same causal chains both in terms of external forces and - more importantly - in terms of our brain function.
But Kant pretty much nails that one - he's hardly the only view on the subject, but this is basically what made him the 'big man' in enlightenment-era European philosophy. Part of being a rational agent ('rational' here doesn't mean perfectly logical - just someone that gives and interprets reasons for acting) is that you can step back and realise that you're just a mechanical object, subject to the same laws that govern everything else around you ('pure reason'), but you're simultaneously compelled to construct a self and a narrative and view your actions as choices - you know that it's not how things actually work, but it isn't something you can switch off, it's a basic feature of how you experience the world ('practical reason'). Because you can't help but transcend your knowledge of the material world and attribute a 'self' to yourself, there's a logic to the idea that you've got to give the same status to others who share your capacities (respect for persons - 'respect' here doesn't mean being nice, though that might follow from it, it just means allowing them the same attribution of reason, choice and consciousness that you give to yourself, even though both physics and psychology give causal explanations for their and your actions).
Switching from Newtonian to modern physics doesn't really alter the situation - inserting the possibility of randomness into our view of the universe does nothing to assist actual free will. It might even make it worse - when the world works in causal chains, you can at least attribute blame for events, but if our actions are random then free will is impossible.
Consciousness and free will actually REQUIRE causation - they require that WE do the causing. The problem is that there's nothing in the material world that sets out what this 'we' is, that's somehow separate from the rest of the universe's causal chains (not to mention our genes, psychology, neurology etc).
But I'm fine with all of that - I'm quite happy to go along with Kant and say that morality, free will, consciousness etc have no basis in the material world and instead are just products of the way we experience things. Because as he argues pretty convincingly, the fact that we experience the world as rational beings is sufficiently basic to our existence that it can act as the foundation for everything else about free will, morality and consciousness.
Basic humanism, in other words.
Where the neurology experiments become troubling for humanists like myself, is that they imply that our 'practical viewpoint' has no basis in the material world of physics (which is fine), but that the material world of physics directly contradicts it - which is not so fine. Kant's point was that it doesn't matter that the 'self' has no material existence, because it's still a basic feature of our experience. But here, material existence isn't just staying silent on self and consciousness - it's contradicting it in a way where it looks like you can no longer separate your thinking into pure v practical reasoning, because the 'pure' perspective is now directly ruling the practical one out (instead of just having no place for it).