[ExI] Digital Consciousness .

spike spike at rainier66.com
Wed Apr 24 18:17:22 UTC 2013



-----Original Message-----
From: extropy-chat-bounces at lists.extropy.org
[mailto:extropy-chat-bounces at lists.extropy.org] On Behalf Of Stathis
Papaioannou

... 

>...There is an argument from David Chalmers which proves that computers can
be conscious assuming only that (a) consciousness is due to the brain and
(b) the observable behaviour of the brain is computable.
...
--
Stathis Papaioannou
_______________________________________________

I just can't see how it could be otherwise.  I may be influenced by some of
the digital sims I have seen over the years, where a sufficiently
sophisticated digital sim predicted a bunch of stuff no one had anticipated.
An example is wingtip flutter on a certain military aircraft.  The old
timers knew that was a possibility, but didn't know where the resonance
would be found.  The digital sim found it, the engineers compensated, built
it, tested it, the wing performed exactly as the sim said.

A sim of a wing structure is a jillion orders of magnitude simpler than a
human brain, but some kinds of brains are simple compared to a human brain.
If we manage to do a sim of a worm, then later a fly, then a mouse, where
exactly is the brick wall that says "NO MORE SIMS BEYOND THIS POINT, signed
god"?  Looks to me like if we can figure out how globs of neurons can learn,
and we know earthworms can learn, then we just get more and more computers,
tie them together and up we go.

spike




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