[thejeff]

Perspective is a tricky word and one difficult to apply to others. If, as you say, "You can only debate what can be shown to be true", I would not be able to speak to the perspective of others, only to their actions.

Their actions do change over time, depending perhaps on their experiences. But the actions of a sufficiently complicated program can change over time depending on it's inputs (which would correspond to experiences).

It may be that the perceived difference lies only in that we are more complicated and that we can not see our own programming.

I don't actually believe this, but it's not easy to disprove. Not that we are just like computers. At the least our "programming" can be rewritten on the fly (which is not impossible for software, by the way), but the hardware can be modified as well.