[ExI] Digital Consciousness .

[John Clark]

On Fri, Apr 26, 2013 at 12:25 AM, Gordon <gts_2000 at yahoo.com> wrote:

> 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.
>

Even if that were true it would be irrelevant. A computer is nothing like
the system of interacting atoms called a suspension bridge and yet a
computer can simulate a bridge with great accuracy, that is the beauty of
computers. You could argue that you can't drive a truck over a computer
like you can a bridge but a bridge is a concrete noun and abstract things like
music and arithmetic are more interesting, and the computer "simulation" of
those abstract things are identical to the things themselves.

A computer can in principle simulate adjectives too, adjectives like
"Gordon Swobe",  and with proper programing a computer could behave in a
very gordonswobeian way. And to say that digital encoding isn't subtle
enough for that sort of thing is just silly; besides being good enough to
encode all of Shakespeare's plays the biological bond you have with your
parents is entirely digital as is the biological bond you have with your
children. Digital information quite literally made you the man that you are.


> I think computationalism is no more than wishful thinking.
>

OK let's talk about wishful thinking. Gordon, I don't know you but I am
quite certain that you didn't just wake up one morning and say to yourself
"gee, carbon atoms are much more emotional than silicon atoms so logically
I can deduce that computers can never be conscious". Instead you
realizedthat you very much wanted for humans to be special and
computers to just be
fancy adding machines, and then because you wanted it to be true so much
you figured that it is indeed true. Only then did you go in search for evidence
in support of what you wish to be correct, and crapola reasons of this sort
are the best you could find.

 John K Clark
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://lists.extropy.org/pipermail/extropy-chat/attachments/20130426/e1fe8804/attachment.html>