AI - Do humans think algorithmically?

Of course they are. Suicide doesn't have to be initiated by depression. A soldier may jump on a grenade to save his comrades. Somehow, suicide is heroic when the good guys do it but crazy when the Japanese or Muslims do it.

Somehow? It seems pretty clear to me.The former suicide is intended to save lives while the later is intended to murder.

I hope you're being ironic.The kamikazes were not trying to "murder" any more than the SBD's and TBDs were trying to murder. Both sides were trying to win the war and, in the long run, save lives.Edited by ringo, : fixed quote

I don’t see the irony.The soldier that jumps on a grenade does so to save the lives of his crew. The kamikaze and the radical muslim suicide bomber do so to kill the enemy and sew the horror of shock and terror that facing a human bomb elicits in people, or to get 79 virgins or whatever the bounty is this year.Are the acts really the same in your view?

Our current understanding of mental processes is still far too primitive to be able to delineate the differences (if such differences even exist) between a conscious act of suicide due to depression and a self destruct action of a computer program. The fact that there are antidepressant drugs, simple molecules with known formula and structure, that may intercede to avoid such suicide might suggest that the neurological programs that lead to depression and suicide could contain “if……then…..” subroutines.

The kamikaze was much like the soldier who jumps on a grenade. He wasn't about "sowing the horror of shock and terror that facing a human bomb elicits in people." He wanted to destroy an enemy ship before it destroyed the ships on his side. Typical soldier, slightly different attitude toward death. Which is not what I said. It's a typical right-wing knee-jerk reaction to "Muslim", which is what I said.But my point was that riVeRraT was wrong about suicide. It isn't something that a machine can not do.Suicide is more complicated than some people think.

It IS what I said. Me. Not you. And I said it because in this world today, when this subject comes up, the muslim suicide bomber is the poster boy of the genre.To broach the subject in this context has nothing to do with any right-wing crazies. It is a reality of this world.

Ringo wrote as part of a reply: Sorry - I lost what these acronyms were somewhere down the road.Suicide Bomb Destroyers
Terrorist Bomb Destroyers???

Exactly. But they are NOT the poster boys of suicide in general.

I just watched Midway the other day.SBD = dive bomber ("Scout Bomber Douglas")
TBD = torpedo bomber ("Torpedo Bomber Douglas")

My experience is that "emergence" is a vague magic word/just so story used to explain anything by people of a certain reductionist bent.I know little neurology, but in physics at least not only can properties of the whole be completely independent of any property of the parts, but in the extreme case properties of the whole possessing a value requires that the parts are without properties.So I see no reason for the mind to be emergent from or just a matter of additional complexity over standard computational processes.

Could you give one or two examples of this. I have a physics background, so details are fine. (Also, I'm a reductionist, not by rational deduction, but by necessity since I'm simply too simple minded to understand anything that can't be reduced to basic causes.)Would an airplane made of legos be an emergent property?

The spin of an atom along a certain axis being well-defined requires that the individual particles of the atom to have no well-defined properties at all.In general a piece of matter has no well-defined number of particles in it, just a probability distribution for what number it might be measured as possessing. Even this probability distribution is observer dependent not objective.Those are just two examples.

Am I missing something? Not having well defined, i.e., single valued, values of a property is not the same as not having that property. The distance from LA to NY is a range of values. But that range is defined and LA and NY do have the property of being some distance apart. The set of IQs of people posting on EvsC (apparently a bimodal distribution) has many values, but is still a defined property.

The individual particles don't have any values at all for their properties, not even a range like the LA-New York case.The IQ case is not analogous as it is multi-valued by being a population distribution. For a single particle there isn't such a population to draw on to constitute a multi-valued set.