[ExI] Digital Consciousness .

[Stathis Papaioannou]

On Fri, Apr 26, 2013 at 2:25 PM, Gordon <gts_2000 at yahoo.com> wrote:
> Stathis,
>
>> If the brain, being a system of interacting atoms, acquires semantics
>> then what forbids a digital computer, also a system of interacting
>> atoms, from also acquiring semantics?
>
> The point here is that organic brains are not like digital computers running
> programs according to syntactical rules. The "systems of interacting atoms"
> that we call brains are nothing like the systems of atoms that we call
> digital computers. If that is true then the computational model of mind is
> at best dubious and at worst false.

Computers are different from brains but unless brains contain a
magical substance there is, at least, nothing *forbidding* computers
from having consciousness.

> It is tempting to imagine that the brain is a sort of natural digital
> computer, created by nature, and that our thoughts are something like
> programs running on the hardware of the brain. But we are assigning that
> designation. Computational states are not actually intrinsic to the physics
> of the brain itself, except that we find it interesting and convenient to
> think so.

That's not really the origin of computationalism. The original idea is
functionalism: that a system which replicates the functional
relationships of the brain will also reproduce the mind. A computer is
then just a means of realising this. And as I have been explaining, if
it is possible to reproduce the functional relationships without also
reproducing consciousness that would lead to the absurd situation
where you could lack some major conscious modality but be unaware of
it and behave normally.


-- 
Stathis Papaioannou