[ExI] Digital Consciousness

[Stathis Papaioannou]

On Tuesday, May 7, 2013, Brent Allsop wrote:

>
>
> Hi Stathis,
>
>
>
> I hear you saying that you have proven, at least in your mind, that there
> is a hard problem with no solution.  Is this necessity not the most
> absurd and faithless necessity in your model?  It’s just a chunk of grey
> matter, and we can quite reliably produce a redness experience and a
> greenness experience and so on.  Why is it that you hold on to such
> questionable rational so tightly, thinking it has been proven, and all that.
> Yet have no qualm at all at accepting that there is such a ‘hard problem’
> and that “it is impossible to make such a device” and so on?
>
> I said nothing about the hard problem. I said that it is impossible to
make a device that replicates the behaviour of a brain component, as a
spare part in any machine would replicate the behaviour of the original
part, but doesn't replicate the consciousness. In other words, if you made
such a part, it would necessarily replicate the consciousness. This means
that consciousness cannot be substrate dependent.

> If your logic is proving that something is impossible, which we know more
> than anything – that it is not impossible, wouldn’t it be better to assume
> you have a problem, somewhere else in your logic, than thinking there is
> such a hard problem with regular old consciousness?
>
> Again, I say nothing about the hard problem. I start with the assumption
that consciousness is substrate dependent and show that this leads to
absurdity; therefore, it can't be right.


-- 
Stathis Papaioannou
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://lists.extropy.org/pipermail/extropy-chat/attachments/20130507/e15fc57a/attachment.html>