I would like to start with a thank you to you. I must thank you though for your participation in the discussion even though we have quite different and essentially opposing views. Your points have given rise for an opportunity to clarify my own position and to think more deeply about your particular claims, even if your evidence is lacking in many ways. There are many who think like you and who are not at all willing to participate in such a discussion. So again I thank you for that and appreciate the time and effort you have taken in your responses.

I have been giving further thought to your responses and what I am seeing is that you hold a particular naturalistic epistemological worldview. This shows up with such statements as:

> Irrelevant. How something was created or formed is irrelevant to the intelligence it possesses.

> Wrong these things are not programmed. They are "trained" and fed information through a "learning" algorithm

and then you disagree with yourself while still keeping in the same naturalistic epistemological framework with

> False. Plants do not learn through any neural process. There are classes of invertebrate known to have nervous systems that do not learn. Jellyfish for example.

If you actually went back and looked at my discussion, I simply gave an example of chordate structures being beyond anything artificial constructs that we make. In addition, I did make the point that these artificial constructs had less intelligence than a single cell organism.

In regards to your saying that [How something was created or formed is irrelevant to the intelligence it possesses], you would have to show with fairly detailed evidence that this claim of yours has a possibility or is the best explanation for what you see.

You have not actually said anything as yet to support your conjectures and to have nullified my evidence for my claims. In fact, when I have asked you to answer some relatively simple questions, you dismissed them as irrelevant without providing any reasoning as to why those specific questions are irrelevant.

What is interesting is that your response to my question in relation to a living and dead brain you say:

> We do know the difference. In the process of dying, brain cells undergo a series of complex changes largely due to a decrease in the supply of essential nutrients and oxygen. As organs like the heart and lungs falter, the brain struggles to maintain its energy-intensive functions. Cells can no longer produce adequate levels of ATP, the molecule essential for energy, leading to an energy crisis within the brain.

But here we see you miss a very important condition. If what you say is true, then resuscitation would be impossible and we do have examples where resuscitation has occurred and occurring long after these processes would have started and in some cases have completed.

Now again you make a fallacious claim when you say:

> Researchers all agree.

Here you are arguing from the fallacy of authority and you are not at all demonstrating that this is the case for ALL researchers in this field.

It is interesting that you say of my arguments and position that:

> Invalid assumption. Not the first time your wrong. But proof your argument is highly fallible.

You make a claim and yet do not actually address any argument I make. The best you seem to be able to do is say something like:

> The failure in your intelligence is in viewing systems as a mechanistic hole. You lack the ability to see how the macro phenomena of life is the formation of physics equations of interacting atoms forming molecules, forming DNA, forming cells, forming neurons. We have equations for atomic physics, we know chemistry and we know how cells are built from atoms and chemistry and we that the brain is built from cells following the same chemistry.

Within the above comment, you make claim after claim and yet provide nothing of evidence to support that claim. I do understand that young people today are not taught how to present their position and arguments in a coherent manner. That particular facility was evident when I was passing through my undergraduate years 40 odd years ago.

Again, what you are showing us all is your particular naturalistic epistemology. You having that is not a problem, but you required to defend that position clearly and logically, which you are not doing.

Now, the other thing that is interesting her is that you make a very specific claim with:

> Instead you see magic you can't explain.

and in doing so, you have only demonstrated that by using the term [magic], you have placed yourself as being the [magic] believer. To discuss this would require an entire different forum. I do find it necessary to point this out to you.

You then claim:

> You've never even wondered about it, never even tried to think deeper to get to the bottom of it or the truth. You just see a little baby do something immensely clever and cute and emotion overwhelms your rationality. You are unable to see the true nature of things that children at the same time being things you love are also collections of atoms going through billions of chemical reactions a second forming this macro phenomenon called "life" and ultimately your kid.

and actually show me that it is you who has failed to think deeply the subject. There are so many questions that you have simply brushed away and you have allowed yourself to think shallowly about what you see. There are many many things that are being investigated by the methods of scientific investigation. The problem that is being found in all sorts of areas is that we see anomalies arising that cannot be explained by our current crop of theories and models. This is actually normal and the basic idea that we have to adjust to is that none of our theories or models is correct. They are all wrong.

The exciting part here is that with more data collected, we have the opportunity to see if there are better theories and models that explain what we see.

I have had a fascination with the electron. Interestingly, in the last hundred or so years, a variety of models have arisen which did not gain traction at the time. Yet today, these models have a possibility to explain what we do see better than the current crop of consensus models.

It is an exciting time to be alive as we can see the potential for breakthroughs in understanding and knowledge. Where we have to be careful is not to get caught up in the hype that does occur. Artificial Stupidity systems are one such area where the hype is extraordinary and the reality is actually being missed.

If you want to think that such systems are intelligent then do so. But you have an enormous uphill battle to prove that. I have thought of a number of questions for you to investigate, but as you have already shown me that you consider such questions as irrelevant, I won't put them before you.

Now as to the URL's you mentioned, the first gives a Cross-Site Scripting error (potential attack), so I won't follow that up.

The second URL to the Smithsonian Magazine, gives an example of data analysis of brain scans. Interesting but not at all to the level you imply with your comment:

> It goes to show how similar machine intelligence is to the human brain if it can partially interpret what moves through it.

In fact, the analysis, though very interesting does not show that it is due to machine intelligence. I have spent years analysing data, building analysis systems and having discussions with other people who are involved in machine learning. The intelligence exhibited is human and not machine. It boils down to something very simple, the only reason these systems exist is because we make them. They have not come about without human intelligence and they cannot progress without human intelligence directing that advancement.

I agree that such systems can be used to augment our abilities, but they don't replace us as our intellectual equals or masters. If we cede control to these unintelligent systems, we then bear the consequences of these systems failing. They will fail and spectacularly at that. If you have any practical engineering background, you will already know that.

So be of good cheer and watch carefully as things develop.