Morality in Nature

[bennyboy]

You'll have to define self-awareness, because the car is monitoring both its environment and itself, and modifying its behavior to meet specific goals. It is doing the FUNCTIONS that are ascribed to awareness, making it (presumably) a philosophical zombie by your definition of awareness.

So in what way is the car not showing awareness in its deterministic, complex interactions with the environment, when a human is?

It is not modifying the framework for behavioral modification.

Like I said in the other thread - self-awareness requires more than monitoring the environment and its own functions - it requires monitoring the process of monitoring. That's the function ascribed to awareness that the car does not display and the human does.

I see your redundancy and raise you two: maybe it's the ability to monitor the monitoring of the monitoring of the monitoring.

Okay, so let's take a community of people. Not only does each individual monitor his own process of monitoring: the entire group monitors the ability of each individual to monitor his own process of monitoring. By your terms, this is sufficient to label the community as a singular agent, and to state that it is self-aware.

This is morality meets Gaia. I didn't take you for such a hippie!