Jaccavrie

"The [computer's] tone was anxious. Laure didn't believe that emotion was put on. He refrained from anthropomorphizing his computer, just as he did those nonhuman sophonts he encountered. At the same time, he didn't go along with the school of thought which claimed that human-sensibility terms were absolutely meaningless in such connections. An alien brain, or a cybernetic one like Jaccavrie's, could think; it was aware; it had conation. Therefore it had analogies to his."
-Poul Anderson, "Starfog" IN Anderson, Flandry's Legacy (New York, 2012), pp. 709-794 AT p. 714.

Analogies to his sensibility terms? I have just googled "conation" and have realized that I had not understood it. I had thought that it was "cognition."

Brains, whether human or non-human, generate consciousness. Computers, including the one on which I am typing and the one on which you are reading, do not generate consciousness. They manipulate symbols according to rules without understanding the meanings of the symbols. Conceivably, some future artifact will not only manipulate symbols but will also generate consciousness and will even be intelligent enough to recognize meanings and understand symbols. Such an artifact might interchangeably be called a "computer" or a "cybernetic brain" in recognition of its different functions.

If, in Laure's time, cybernetic brains are known to be aware, then there should be no school of thought claiming that human-sensibility terms are meaningless. So does Anderson mean that it is only Laure's opinion that cybernetic brains are aware? Laure's conversations with Jaccavrie imply that such brains pass the Turing Test. If any entity passed that test and was then shown to have been merely manipulating symbols, as a modern computer does, then I would have a major philosophical problem.

To pass the Turing Test, i.e., to converse in a way indistinguishable from that of an intelligent being, any entity told a racist joke would have to:

laugh or
not get the joke or
understand the joke but not think that it was funny or
groan at a bad joke or
tell another joke in return or
say, "I don't think that's very funny!" or
say, "That's offensive!" or
threaten legal action or
change the subject or
say nothing or
end the conversation or
respond in some other unpredictable way.