Presumably consciousness depends on the right material. Pen and paper isn't sufficiently like brain matter to seem a reasonable source of consciousness, but perhaps silicon chips are.

Or maybe silicon chips aren't, but that in the future we will be able to build organic computers (which would amount to artificial brains, I suppose). Wetware computers are a current concept (with a prototype).

Or maybe silicon chips aren't, but that in the future we are able to build organic computers (which would amount to artificial brains, I suppose). — Michael

A Jupiter-sized organic brain that could dream of us?

A Jupiter-sized organic brain that could dream of us? — Marchesk

Well, I suppose at the very least it would only need to be as big as the combined size of all brains on Earth.

But then we might be able to improve on the human brain and get the same result with much less stuff.

We already have such a scenario. God has all conscious content (perceptual reality) from which we get all of our individual conscious content (the world we perceive). No hypothetical scenarios necessary.

"Presumably consciousness depends on the right material. Pen and paper isn't sufficiently like brain matter to seem a reasonable source of consciousness, but perhaps silicon chips are."


That is a pretty big assumption, at best consciousness, at least our own personal consciousness, can only be assumed to exist in correlation with our own healthy brain states (and this is only an observed correlative and not causal or originating relationship) but beyond that what can actually be proven regarding the conditions of consciousness?

Well, the Wittgensteinian answer would be to say that the environmental and cultural context that is normally present when asserting that "China Brain" is conscious, is lacking, in the same way that the normal context required for the same assertion is also lacking when considering the abstract operations of a human brain divorced from it's environmental and inter-personal context.

In my opinion the "other mind" realist is only bemused because he insists on imagining a vast graph of interacting neurons, ants or chinese people and thinks to himself "i can't relate to this mechanism, because i cannot imagine facial expressions, eyes and a mouth and intelligent interaction with it" and he then proceeds to mistake his lack of empathy for the mechanism for an absence of an intrinsic property within the mechanism.

Well, the Wittgensteinian answer would be to say that the environmental and cultural context that is normally present when asserting that "China Brain" is conscious, is lacking, in the same way that the normal context required for the same assertion is also lacking when considering the abstract operations of a human brain divorced from it's environmental and inter-personal context. — sime

But what if it's a simulation of a human society and not just a brain? Would all those 1s and 0s written out on paper over a century have experiences then?

But what if it's a simulation of a human society and not just a brain? Would all those 1s and 0s written out on paper over a century have experiences then? — Marchesk

Over the years i have noticed that my personal and pre-theoretic recognition of other minds on an emotional level is skin-deep, analogous to "if it speaks and acts like a duck, then it is a duck *by definition*".

I would have to say that any simulation of humans that I naturally empathise with, regardless of the medium of instantiation, is conscious for me by definition, and to an extent that is dependant on the overall context.

I guess this suggests that, for me at least, the bit representation of 'other minds i recognize' is meaningful to the context-specific extent that it produces the recognized conscious-behaviour.

So, just as with complied software, a mere string of 1s and 0s is meaningless in and of itself and does not relate to conscious behaviour, unless running as a program within a specific architectural medium that produces the necessary behaviour. So in a holistic sense, i would say it is partially relevant, but not in any mind-independent sense.

I would have to say that any simulation of humans that I naturally empathise with, regardless of the medium of instantiation, is conscious for me by definition, and to an extent that is dependant on the overall context. — sime

How would you define consciousness then? The presumption of awareness in a observed object on the grounds of your personal imputation of such? Based on your own state of empathy?

Does the computer the simulation runs on matter? — Marchesk

For consciousness, maybe this is necessary .......

The emergent behavior can model itself.

The emergent behavior can model itself. — Jake Tarragon

How about a conventional computer running a simulation of a billion chinese using pencil & paper over a century to simulate a conscious society of humans.

lol! That wouldn't do it, obviously.

Assume it's possible to make conscious simulated people with enough detail and computing power. They experience their digital world like we experience our world.

Does the computer the simulation runs on matter? Let's build one using a billion Chinese people. They write out their assigned part of the computation with pencil and paper. Let's say they work 40 hour weeks. This is no sweat shop simulator. It takes them 100 years (the labor force is kept constan ) to finish the simulation on paper. All of the individual papers are saved.

Do the simulated people still have conscious experiences with a human Chinese computer? I would say no way, it's absurd on the face of it. — Marchesk

Yes, the person simulated by the computer consisting of many humans has conscious experiences, as does any purposefully-responsive device.

For more realism, we should give your human-computer more people, even though the Earth only has about 7 billion people.

But, regardless of how complex it is or isn't, any purposefully-responsive device is, in principle, the same.

What does "consciousness" or "experience" mean, for a general purposefully-responsive device?

Its "experience" is its surroundings and events, in the context of its built-in purposes, as a purposefully-responsive device.

Its "consciousness" is its property of being a purposefully-responsive device..

Conventionally, we don't use the words "consciousness" or "experience" for the simpler man-made purposefully-responsive devices, such as a mousetrap, a thermostat, or a refrigerator-lightswitch.

But, essentially, in principle, a human is a purposefully-responsive device like a mousetrap.

We can each arbitrarily choose at what point we use the word "conscious". I use it very broadly, to include any member of Animalia, or any natural-selection-made biological organism that reacts immediately to its surroundings, and any man-made device whose complexity and capability matches theirs.

Plants, in general, react more slowly to their environment, and so, we don't usually speak of them as conscious. It just depends on the arbitrary matter of usage-choice..But why should time-scale make the difference between conscious and not conscious? Animal chauvinism?

A matter of individual usage. But, as for objective definitions, what can be said is that everything from humans to moustraps is in the same category--purposefully-responsive devices.

In that regard, it doesn't matter what the device is made of. It can consist of billions of humans working with pencil and paper. It can be made of old beer-cans and strings. It can be biological, electronic, or mechanical. It can be a mousetrap or a human.

Michael Ossipoff

If you had a hundred billion Chinese people, each of them could simulate a neuron, and provided they used the same algorithms as a human brain, it could simulate a human mind, if a glacially slow mind.

I think the problem is that the CPM (Chinese people mind) would be too slow to match temporal reality and therefore consciousness could not be achieved, or rather ‘felt’.

Assume it's possible to make conscious simulated people with enough detail and computing power. They experience their digital world like we experience our world. — Marchesk

We experience qualia. How can these be simulated? If you flip on a bit for the perception od redness (for example), you could program a human-like behavioral reaction, but this is not experiening the world as we do.

Do the simulated people still have conscious experiences with a human Chinese computer? — Marchesk

Perhaps the only way we could tell is to interview the simulated people?

First thing is that Science does not know what consciousness actually is. How can you simulate something when you don't know what the thing is that you are simulating? When Science gets a clue about Consciousness then we can talk about simulating it.

If you had a hundred billion Chinese people, each of them could simulate a neuron, and provided they used the same algorithms as a human brain, it could simulate a human mind, if a glacially slow mind. — praxis

We already have a prototype. It's called the Chinese Communist Party.

I was reading a little about Mao the other day. Talk about a faulty circuit.

But very very good at war.

Do the simulated people still have conscious experiences with a human Chinese computer? I would say no way, it's absurd on the face of it. So then, what would make an electronic computer different in a way that would confer consciousness to its sims? — Marchesk

Creativity. A programmed computer cannot recreate spontaneous and evolutionary new ideas. This is what defines human behaiour above AI and it can't be replicated.

Isn't a movie a type of simulated consciousness?

I mean, sure, they involve real people. But, the characters are not the actors themselves. The characters which relay consciousness to us are made up. Computers also do that, with animations. All humans do is provide sound, and mobility patterns.

I think the better question would be, what is consciousness that it could be relayed in such ways?