You're a machine. You're literally a wet, analog device converting some forms of energy into other forms just like any other machine as you work, rest, type out HN comments, etc. There is nothing special about the carbon atoms in your body -- there's no metadata attached to them marking them out as belonging to a Living Person. Other living-person-machines treat "you" differently than other clusters of atoms only because evolution has taught us that doing so is a mutually beneficial social convention.
So, since you're just a machine, any text you generate should be uninteresting to me -- correct?
Alternatively, could it be that a sufficiently complex and intricate machine can be interesting to observe in its own right?
If humans are machines, they are still a subset of machines and they (among other animals) are the only ones who can be demotivated and so it is still a mistake to assume an entirely different kind of machine would have those properties.
>Other living-person-machines treat "you" differently than other clusters of atoms only because evolution has taught us that doing so is a mutually beneficial social convention
Evolution doesn't "teach" anything. It's just an emergent property of the fact that life reproduces (and sometimes doesn't). If you're going to have this radically reductionist view of humanity, you can't also treat evolution as having any kind of agency.
"If humans are machines, they are still a subset of machines and they (among other animals) are the only ones who can be demotivated and so it is still a mistake to assume an entirely different kind of machine would have those properties."
Wrong level of abstraction. And not the definition of machine.
I might feel awe or amazement at what human-made machines can do -- the reason I got into programming. But I don't attribute human qualities to computers or software, a category error. No computer ever looked at me as interesting or tenacious.
So, since you're just a machine, any text you generate should be uninteresting to me -- correct?
Alternatively, could it be that a sufficiently complex and intricate machine can be interesting to observe in its own right?