> I doubt that you're of the same opinion, but even if conciousness is a gift from God, would people truely "know" that the robodog hadn't been so endowed?

If you want to go there, how do you "know" your Barbie doll isn't endowed with consciousness? It expresses human emotion better than a snail does, after all.

I just don't even comprehend this line of reasoning. The robodog I'm talking about is a refinement of existing computing technologies. Nobody I know outside of Computer Stupidities assumes existing computers are conscious, so to posit that at some point on the line of this technological progression, "consciousness" is mysteriously created, well, should we have been asking that question all along? Is the Pentium more conscious than the 486? Are double-bladed safety razors more conscious than straight razors? Are those dolls that *actually wet themselves* more conscious than traditional kinds? Maybe it's immoral to be playing video games, where each new game has enemies with increasingly complex AI.

Though nobody posited it, IF we were talking about robodogs that utilize fundamentally different technologies, like quantum mechanics vs. simple electronics, MAYBE this wouldn't strike me as quite so silly an argument. But the assumption here is that these robodogs are simple extensions to well-understood computing technologies in use by computers today and very distinctly NOT used by ANYTHING commonly assumed to be conscious, like a human or an animal.

The burden of proof, therefore, is on you, not me, to establish that at some mysterious point on the progression of electronic computing technology we suddenly achieve the creation of consciousness. Good luck doing that without a pseudo-intellectual contrivance for a definition of "consciousness."