Still doing reading catch-up, I'm now looking at the April 23 2007 edition of Newsweek. There's an article by Sharon Begley titled "Know Thyself - Man, Rat, or Bot" that raises some interesting questions. It deals with metacognition - the ability to think about your thoughts - and whether this is still only a human trait.
In short, the answer is no. It turns out that man is not the only creature who thinks about thinking - researchers have found that other creatures show signs of metacognition. In test, rats think before choosing to push a lever. The right answer gets lots of pellets, but an incorrect answer gets none. Declining to answer if unsure yields a smaller reward, but does deliver some pellets. The rats took a pass, or as Begley put it "they knew what they didn't know" and evidently didn't answer unless they were sure. And it's not just rats - other tests have shown similar results with dolphins and rhesus monkeys.
Begley ends with the observation that we are getting close to the point where AI systems will be capable of something similar - evaluating where the calculation went wrong, then considering whether to take a different path toward a solution. In other words, an introspective, self-aware, computer.
So maybe Mark Twain had it wrong after all, when he said "Man is the only animal that blushes. Or needs to."
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