[ExI] digital simulations, descriptions and copies

Eric Messick eric at m056832107.syzygy.com
Sun Jan 24 00:15:58 UTC 2010


Gordon writes:
>In this thread I target such religious nonsense as that which I see
> when people say that digitally simulated people can eat and taste
> digitally simulated apples. Eric has come forth to defend that
> idea. Will you defend it too?

Hey, no need to disparage my remarks with the label "religious"!

When you bite into an apple, your sensory neurons excite a particular
neural firing pattern in your brain.  That pattern represents (among
other things) your experience of what it is like to eat an apple.
That pattern encodes a set of symbols which are grounded by the
signals coming in from your sensory neurons.

You probably have no words for most of those symbols, since the
experience is much more rich than a verbal description of the
experience.

Now let's consider a simulated person biting into a simulated apple.
At some level, the apple simulation communicates to the mouth
simulation some information about taste and texture.  That information
gets translated into simulated sensory neural signals.  The brain
simulation generates a neural firing pattern based partly on the
sensory signals.  The resulting pattern encodes some of the same
symbols that were activated in your real brain when you really bit
into an apple.

Our simulated person then decides to describe the experience in a
simulated email, which he sends to a real friend.  When the friend
reads the (now real) email, she decides that her friend has enjoyed an
apple.

If no one has actually enjoyed an apple, who wrote the email?

Or, do you contend that no such email could possibly be produced?

>Digitally simulated people can eat digitally simulated apples in the
> same sense that "Gandalf" can "smoke" a "pipe" in "Middle Earth",
> which is to say they "eat them", but *not really*.

So you keep asserting...

-eric



More information about the extropy-chat mailing list