[ExI] Digital Consciousness .

[Anders Sandberg]

On 25/04/2013 00:37, Brent Allsop wrote:
>
> Anders,
>
> As usual, you have lots of great things to say.  But help me 
> understand exactly what you mean by "level independent" consciousness.
>
> Are you saying that if you have or experience some of that, then you 
> know that it is fundamental, and can't be an abstract simulation at 
> some abstracted or interpreted higher level?  In other words, if what 
> you are saying is true, then that would be proof that our 
> consciousness is at the fundamental level, and can't be at some 
> arbitrary abstracted or interpreted level above that?

I invented the term "level independent" to denote abilities or 
properties that exist for real regardless of what kind of system is 
doing it. Chess-playing and having chess-playing skill, for example, can 
be done by humans, by computers, by software emulations of Deep Blue 
running on a different computer, or Chinese rooms. I think it makes 
sense to say that all these systems can play chess.

Now, level-independent consciousness would be that if something, 
somewhere did whatever it takes to get consciousness it would indeed 
produce real consciousness, even if that something was software or 
running virtualized on something else. So if you are conscious (and 
aware of it), your consciousnessness is *not* evidence of you living in 
base reality in this scenario.

On the other hand, if consciousness is level-dependent, then it might be 
like "hurricane-caused-wetness" or "being part of the real world" - 
either something that is real within its own level of simulation or 
something that has to exist just in a particular domain (typically, base 
reality). If consciousness is level-dependent like the wetness case 
there could be sim-consciousness in the uploads but it is not 
real-consciousness; whether that matters or not depends on how one 
envisions the difference in properties of sim-consciousness from 
real-consciousness. If consciousness is bound to a particular domain 
then we could indeed use our consciousness as proof of our kind of 
reality, but logically it leaves the question open what happens when you 
have perfect simulations of reality since consciousness does seem to 
have causal effects (like this thread).



-- 
Anders Sandberg,
Future of Humanity Institute
Oxford Martin School
Faculty of Philosophy
Oxford University