I wrote: Unfortunately for the crickets, they cannot tell one another apart, and > they cannot tell the difference between a cricket and a plastic model of > one. So, naturalists who wanted to give a male cricket an inferiority > complex engaged in ritual combat with him using a plastic model of a > cricket. They did this over and over again with the same plastic model. The > poor guy-cricket did not realize he was fighting the same dummy cricket > every time. >
My point being, that barely qualifies as conscious. Not as I defined it: "Awareness of surroundings. Some ability to make choices . . ." It is more like a set of complicated hard-wired reactions. The cricket mistakes a plastic object for another cricket. Its perceptions and awareness of the surroundings are very crude, compared to a bird or mouse. A self-driving car probably has a better "mental model" of the surrounding environment than the cricket does. Maybe not . . . you can easily fool a self-driving car with a two-dimensional cutout model of a pedestrian. I saw a video of that the other day. The car may not be A.I. based. I wouldn't know. - Jed
