[ExI] Semiotics and Computability

[Stathis Papaioannou]

On 12 February 2010 12:49, Gordon Swobe <gts_2000 at yahoo.com> wrote:
> --- On Thu, 2/11/10, Stathis Papaioannou <stathisp at gmail.com> wrote:
>
>>> I don't play video games myself but I've known
>>> children who did. They often spoke of the characters in
>>> their video games as if those characters really existed as
>>> conscious entities. Then they matured.
>>
>> Characters in video games do certain things such as shoot
>> other characters. If they were connected to a robot arm and
>> camera, they might be able to shoot real people, really dead.
>
> No sir. The supposed lawyer for such a character in such a video game has a good defense: his client could not have shot anyone because his client does not exist except in someone's overly vivid imagination.
>
> The sensible people on the jury will find that a mixed-up child or perhaps a philosophically-challenged adult used a hi-tech weapon disguised as a computer game to shoot a real person.

I was simply pointing out that the shooting would be a REAL shooting
resulting in a REAL death, even though the character is simulated.
Whether the character understood what it was doing is a different
question, but in general you cannot use the argument that it was a
simulation to preclude this possibility, because the claim that, a
priori, a simulation cannot have ANY property of the thing it is
simulating is obviously ridiculous.


-- 
Stathis Papaioannou