Why does it matter when it has its first environmental contact? I mean, the computer may have been working on bank deposits or car designs for three years, unconsciously, but then something is added, contact is made - and
that moment becomes its moment of "conception" as a self-aware entity.
A computer may be powerful, as are humans, but deproved of sense a human being is an isolated, yet highly complex vegetable. A computer is less than this existing, and coming into being, in a non-spatial realm (physically speaking). If they employed a vast array of sensory organs I could begin to imagine it.
Exactly! A NASA computer
isn't deprived of sensory input. It has eyes (cameras) way the hell out in orbit around Saturn, eyes and ears and a tongue for tasting soil on the Mars Rover, and Skype connection with a thousand human scientists, as well as a thousand other computers.
Not to mention all the images and music, speech-recognition and movie animation programs, diagrams and graphs that have been stockpiled in its memory.
Even then, I'd be hard pressed to say "consicousness". I believe the better term now is "Augmented Intelligence" as "Artifiicial Intelligence" is merely a simulation not truly a independent vehicle.
Okay.
But refusing to acknowledge China or Cuba doesn't stop them existing or having a sense of their own self.