[ExI] Digital Consciousness

[Gordon]

Stathis Papaioannou <stathisp at gmail.com> wrote;


>> Digital implants can certainly stimulate the experience of qualia in the

>> NCC, but so too can electrical shocks or any other external stimulus. I do
>> not believe such implants can themselves have or embody conscious experience
>> of qualia.

>But if the implants are in the supposed NCC and the subject behaves
>just the same, what would that tell you?

I believe that if we replaced all the neurons in the NCC with digital implants, the victim of our evil experiment would become comatose. I think something is happening in those parts of the brain that correlate to consciousness that is not equivalent to digital processing. It's a biological process, perhaps electro-chemical in nature, and although we might be able to describe it digitally, and build digital implants using that description as a blueprint, the implants themselves would fail as they are different sort of thing than the biological processes they describe. Just as a digital simulation of a house is not a house in which you can actually live, a digital simulation of the NCC is not the NCC. The map is not the territory when the map is intrinsically digital and the territory is not.

However, in answer to your question: if the subject were to behave just the same, that would tell me that I was wrong, that humans are digital computers, and that I should reconsider my philosophy. :)


Gordon
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://lists.extropy.org/pipermail/extropy-chat/attachments/20130504/da45b84f/attachment.html>