AI Again

We are told that there are "consciousness-level computers" in the Technic History timeline. Flandry meets one. Computers manipulate symbols. Manipulation of symbols is not consciousness of their meanings or of anything else and will not become such merely by increasing in speed or improving in efficiency. However, a future artifact might both compute and be conscious.

I saw a TV interview with an uneducated Indian woman who, without understanding how she did it, instantly performed any mathematical calculation in her head. She simply stated the answer correct to six places of decimals. Her answers were checked by a man with a calculator which was slower and went only to four places of decimals so they seemed to disagree until she explained the discrepancy. She was a conscious organic computer.

Chee Lan tells the ship's computer, Muddlehead:

"'You're not a person!...Not even in fact, let alone the law!'"
-Poul Anderson, "The Trouble Twisters" IN Anderson, David Falkayn: Star Trader (Riverdale, NY, 2010), pp. 77-208 AT p. 208.

I thought that Muddlehead was a consciousness-level computer but will now have to reread the texts more carefully to make sure. A person is a self-conscious entity like:

a human being;
a hypothetical extraterrestrial;
a disembodied soul;
an angel;
a demon;
a god;
other kinds of imaginary supernatural beings;
a consciousness-level computer.

I do not believe that most of these entities exist but, if they did, then they would be persons in fact, even if not in law.