We are no different than computers

[Thumpalumpacus]

Will you keep adding modifiers if it turns out that machines can do these things - as you just did?  

As the conversation gets more specific, of course modifiers should be added.  It's sort of the nature of these things.

Disagree all you like, but I think that lying can be described a little more simply than the creation of some alternate reality Parker.  Like...claiming something you both know to be untrue..which is so blissfully easy to do in a machine setting it pains me to tell you that all that is required is the negation of a true statement, voila...a lie has been produced.  All of this is ignoring how uncreative our every day human lies are to begin with. :wink:

Do you have an instance of a computer telling a lie without having been instructed to do so? That is the creative act.

We build negation into the alu's that control every cpu of every device with a computer circuit. -All- computers are capable of lying, we simply program them to do other, more useful things. Find me a useful lie and I bet you'll find machines generating those as well. While I don't think that negation encapsulates every idea you and I may have attached with lying, it -completely describes- the operative effect of a lie- by everyday use of the simplest possible gate.

That's fair enough.  But again, the fact that they must be programmed to be creative is evidence that there is an inherent difference between men and computers.  The arts came about in men spontaneously, and in my opinion, they arose in order to express the ineffable. Programming a computer to compose a song or book according to provided parameters is not creativity in action. It is imparting formulae and harvesting the results of a mechanical process.
I don't know if computers will ever have a sense of self, or a sense of the ineffable; perhaps they will, perhaps they won't -- but I know that the OP's assertion that we're no different than computers is, today, not an accurate statement.