[ExI] Newbie Question: Consciousness and Intelligence

[Gordon Swobe]

--- On Mon, 2/15/10, Stathis Papaioannou <stathisp at gmail.com> wrote:

> You keep repeating this as a fact but you don't explain why
> a digital depiction of a person won't have real mental status. 

If I make a jpeg of you with my digital camera, that digital depiction of you will have no mental states. If I make a digital movie of you on my webcam, that digital depiction of you will have no mental states. A complete three-dimensional animated digital depiction of you made with futuristic digital simulation technology will amount to just another kind of depiction of you, and so it will likewise have no mental states. 

It does not matter whether we create our depictions of things on the walls of caves or on computers. Depictions of things do not equal the things they depict.

-gts