When debating on 'Artificial Intelligence', sometimes you are told that 'everything in the universe is conscious', therefore a computer must be conscious too! You are even told that a computer can be possessed by spirits. This is then taken to mean that fears of terminator-like 'rise of the machines' to take over the world should be taken seriously! So it is no longer 'artificial intelligence' at all. No, it is not technology any more. It is now a full blown incarnate evil spirits, a 'works of the devil' that 'no human can understand'!
This happens when you insist that a computer is actually nothing but a clockwork device no different from a series of gears and gogs. In this way, the idea that a computer can be 'intelligent' is misguided. So the advocate of the devil now switches gears and talk of spirits that can be incarnate in machines, or that machines being inherently consciou is plausible. But can the 'panpsychic' idea that 'everything is conscious' means that a computer can truely become 'intelligent' like a human being? I don't think so! First, everything is not conscious. I don't think that is the proper stand of panpsychicsm. If everything was conscious, there is realy no need for the evil spirits to waite for a human being to create a sophisticated computer. They can possess TV sets, vehicles, chairs stones etc. Those spirit would simply incarnate in your car and voila, it now becomes 'artificial intelligence' driving you to wherever it chose!
In panpsychicsm, we say that 'everything is proto-conscious', not 'everything is conscious'. Proto-consciousness is, in some way, like 'potential energy'. So it is a suggestion that consciousness is fundamental in nature even though no everything at every time is manifestly conscious. Movement is fundamental in the sense that it doesn't arise from a combination of things that each of them is not itself movement. But, as you can see, this does not mean that everything is in a state of motion. An object can still stand still, even if movement is fundamental properties of objects. It is in this sense of 'stopping from moving' that things such as stones, tables etc are not conscious. They are sort of 'sleeping', and even a conscious human can cease being so in a deep sleep. So it is not true to say 'everything is conscious', but consciousness is a fundamental property of all things, nevertheless.
A computer cannot be conscious because it is designed purposefully to mimic human activities without being conscious. Pascal's adding machine is designed to add numbers unconsciously in that non of the individual activities by the gears etc act with intend to summing numbers. They are just being moved by adjacent gears, and ultimately by humans, in a totally blind way. We don't need any incarnation of 'spirit' to explain how addition of numbers comes about. The process can be perfectly understood by a human, and it is very easy to do that. The fact that both the addition machine and the brain arrives at the same end: adding numbers, doesn't mean that they work the same way.
But a computer works exactly like a Pascal's adding machine! Inspect each and every component as it works, and you find it doing simple task that are, not different from 'movement of gears'. One transistor drives an adjacent transistor just like gears drives adjacent gears. The whole thing is totally blind! Complexity is not 'magics'. If each and every activity is blind, then a 'complex' combination of such activities results in nothing but a complex, blind machine. Anything else other than this is sorcery! Perhaps a spirit could incarnate somewhere in a transistor, but a computer is made purposefully not to work on such. This is because the aim was to create a machine that can be used and controled by a human being. Incarnation of 'spirits' would merely bring uncertainties to how the computer works and it becomes unreliable. It was for this reason that we wanted a computer to do the task, rather than a human doing it. The 'spirit' in human brings about what will be 'errors' from the point of view of those who want to employ the 'computer'. If you don't understand the spirit workings in the brain, which I suppose this is the case for scientists etc, then they will only seem like errors to you, and you will want a machine that 'doesn't have such errors', and a computer is precisely such a machine.
On the other hand, the brain works in a totally different way from a computer. A brain is not an 'ensemble of blind events' that each can be understood by a human being. Each component forming the brain, down to molecular level works in a 'chaotic' manner as influenced by the surrounding environment in a totally unpredictable way. If we were seeking a theory of 'soul interaction with matter', then we will not want one that results in absurdities such as 'why the soul does not incarnate in a stone etc'. A theory that allows a soul to incarnate in a computer is precisely such a theory. But if we suppose that the soul takes the advantage of microscopic wigglings, then we can readily explain why it incarnates in thr brain but not in a stone. This is because the brain has various means for amplifying and cohering those microscopic wigglings. On the other hand, the man made computer has none and does not tolerate any 'wigglings' that those tidy brains in tech doesn't understand, as they only brings about 'errors'.
