Gianluca Calcagni

In an artificial being, all the following: * Consciousness * Emotionality * Intelligence * Personality * Creativity * Volition are distinct properties that, in theory, may be activated independently. Let me explain. What I Hope to Achieve By publishing this post, I hope to develop and standardise some useful terms and concepts often found in many other posts. I also wish to explain in which sense some properties are linked to others - and, importantly, when they are not. I hope this post will be of help and provide a common context for future further discussions. What I am not trying to achieve is some universal definition of consciousness/intelligence/… simply because that’s too hard! To avoid controversies, I will focus on operational facets and nothing more[1]. I am still aware that the final result will be very opinionated, so feel free to challenge me and open my mind. The Basics Let’s suppose you walk around a new planet and you find some kind of system (artificial or natural - it doesn’t matter) that is able to “autonomously” execute general computations (digital, analog, quantum - it doesn’t matter, and it doesn’t matter which ones and why). Think of it as a universal Turing machine[2]: we’ll call such a system a computational being. Of course, I could just call it a computer - but the problem is that most people don’t recognise themselves as “computers”, hence the term has some semantic bias; also, would you consider an ecosystem as a “computer”? And yet an ecosystem can run computations, if you are inclined to interpret in that way the lifecycle of its inhabitants while they maintain (unknowingly) a stable equilibrium. So, let me use “computational being” as an umbrella term and as the foundation for the rest of the discussion. * Natural examples of computational beings: any living being is also a computational being. Selfish genes favour, by means of natural selection, computations that support their own reproduction. The competition betwee