The Bullis book club selected "Being You" for a book to read. It is written by Professor Anil Seth, a neuroscientist. He has a TED talk about how we humans get to feel we have a special internal presence or voice or center, much like what is often meant by saying humans are conscious beings. This sense of an ongoing, continuous self that has been with us nearly since our beginning is one of the essential and expected parts of being human.
Various disciplines have been debating what we are for a long time. The Hebrew-Christian Bible says that God took some clay and made us and breathed life into His creation. Some people doubt the particulars these days. I have read that Mary Shelley was inspired to write "Frankenstein" in 1818 after seeing a demonstration using cadavers that sat upright when some electricity was applied to the base of the spine. The idea of building a very strong, very intelligent machine that looks and acts like a person comes and goes, these days. Sometimes, the notion is a warrior or a servant, sometimes the creation is to be able to do what humans can't.
I studied computer basics in 1965 and have since heard about computers that can do amazing things. A program called Eliza is well-known for its ability to hold a conversation with a human by way of sentences from a human and back from Eliza. Online now, there are versions of Eliza to assist people who want to talk to a therapist using the sort of abilities Eliza has to understand and ask questions and seem to think.
In relation to the subject of very advanced humans (usually in matters of intelligence and communication, not as often about simulating human motions and physical abilities), the subject of the Turing test and the Loebner contest come up. Alan Turing, a logician and important figure in WWII cryptography, proposed what has come to be called the Turing test. Let people receive written communications from a person and a computer. If the people can't tell which came from which, the computer is equal to the person. The Loebner contest ran for several years and tried inviting computer scientists to provide their best programs in the contest. Brian Christianson was awarded the title "The Most Human Human" in a run of the contest since he seemed to be able to convince judges he was a human easily. I have read that one run of the contest caused a woman to be labeled a computer since the judges thought no one could know as much as she did and she must be a computer. Christianson has two books related to this subject.
