I did not mean it as a rhetorical question. What I was getting at was that you haven't put forth any description or meaning of consciousness. When I said that consciousness is meaningless, I mean that it is meaningless as an argument. Obviously it is of huge importance to AI etc. But it keeps getting thrown out like "Well, computers can't be intelligent, because of uh... consciousness." No matter how many times you simply repeat the word, that's not an argument or proof, it's just tired old philosophical back-patting. Capitalizing it doesn't do anything either. It's the same thing for "perceived" and "independent." Put forward a good functional description, and you can start to say things like "Computers can do this, but not that."

"1. The brain comes pre-set to learn practically anything." How is that different from the example I gave earlier? Several lines of code being able to produce a variety of responses to a diverse set of experiences. "First of all, no technician is programming a child's brain with a limited set of routines or algorythms." In my example, no technician is explicitly programming each of the responses either.

I think you are confusing two different meanings of the word independent. No computer or person has any sort of metaphysical independence. The meaning that you are looking for is the ability of an intelligence to respond to a wide variety of situations in a more positive than negative fashion, without an intervening outside intelligence. Independence is only important in the sense of not requiring something else for continued effective operation.

A good indicator intelligence, although by no means a requirement, is when a seemingly small "program"(or brain) can react successfully to a much larger variety of situations than are explicitly programmed for. For example, a human is intelligent because one unique human can learn to climb mountains, play a trombone, recognize symbolism in a film etc. If a computer program can do all of that without further/explicit programming, why wouldn't you consider that to be intelligent?