[ExI] Semiotics and Computability

[Stathis Papaioannou]

On 12 February 2010 01:06, Gordon Swobe <gts_2000 at yahoo.com> wrote:
> --- On Thu, 2/11/10, Stathis Papaioannou <stathisp at gmail.com> wrote:
>
>> Would you say that a robot that seems to walk isn't really
>> walking because it is not identical to, and therefore lacks all of
>> the properties of, a human walking?
>
> My point here concerns digital simulations of brains, not robots.
>
>> The argument is that the computer can reproduce the consciousness of the
>> brain if it is able to reproduces the brain's behaviour.
>
> Characters in video games behave as if they have consciousness. Seems to me that digitally simulated brains will also behave as if they have consciousness, but that they will have no more consciousness than do those characters in video games.
>
> I don't play video games myself but I've known children who did. They often spoke of the characters in their video games as if those characters really existed as consciousness entities. Then they matured.

Characters in video games do certain things such as shoot other
characters. If they were connected to a robot arm and camera, they
might be able to shoot real people, really dead. So it is not a valid
objection to say that because the simulation is not identical with the
original, it cannot do anything that the original can do. You have to
show that consciousness is beyond the power of a simulation to
reproduce, not that a computer differs from a brain, which no-one is
disputing.


-- 
Stathis Papaioannou