[ExI] Do digital computers feel?

[Jason Resch]

On Fri, Dec 30, 2016 at 1:14 AM, Rafal Smigrodzki <
rafal.smigrodzki at gmail.com> wrote:

>
>
> On Tue, Dec 27, 2016 at 12:03 PM, Jason Resch <jasonresch at gmail.com>
> wrote:
>
>>
>> If infinities are relevant to mental states, they must be irrelevant to
>> any external behavior that can be tested in any way. This is because the
>> holographic principal places discrete and finite bounds on the amount of
>> information that can be stored in a an area of space of finite volume. Even
>> if there is infinite information in your head, no physical process
>> (including you) can access it.
>>
>
> ### Indeed, this is a valuable insight. But you could still have
> qualitative but inaccessible (to other observers) differences between the
> mental states realized on finite machines vs. ones implemented in
> (putatively) infinite physics.
>
> ---------------------------------------------------
>

What would be accessing this information and having these perceptions then?
It seems to me you would need some "raw perceiver" which itself is divorced
entirely from the physical universe. Can there be perceptions that in
theory can have no effect on behavior whatsoever? Not even in detectable
differences in neuronal behavior or positions of particles in the brain?


>
>
>>>
>> This is analogy is somewhat backwards, in my opinion.
>>
>> It's not that the brain works like a computer, it's that computers can
>> perfectly mimic any finite process. They are "universal machines" in the
>> same sense of a universal remote, or in that a speaker system can function
>> as a "universal instrument".
>>
>> Therefore, if the brain is a machine, and is finite, then an
>> appropriately programmed computer can perfectly emulate any of its
>> behaviors. Philosophers generally fall into one os three camps, on the
>> question of consciousness and the computational theory of mind:
>>
>> *Non-computable physicists - *Believe human thought involves physical
>> processes that are non-computable, and therefore conclude that it’s
>> impossible to replicate the behavior of a human brain using a computer.
>>
>> *Weak AI proponents - * Believe the behavior of the human brain can be
>> replicated by computer, but assume such a reproduction, no matter how good,
>> would not possess a mind or consciousness.
>>
>> *Computationalists - *Believe the behavior of the human brain can be
>> replicated by a computer, and assume that when the reproduction is
>> sufficiently faithful, it possesses a mind and conscious.
>>
>>
>> Which camp do you consider yourself in?
>>
>
> ### I have always considered myself a computationalist but recently
> thinking about the identity of indiscernibles as applied to finite
> mathematical objects simulating mental processes I became confused. I think
> I am still a computationalist but a mildly uneasy one. At least, if
> digitally simulated human minds are P-zombies, it won't hurt to be one, so
> I still intend to get uploaded ASAP.
>
>
What does your unease come from? Is it the uncertainty over whether or not
the brain is infinite or finite? I think even if it is finite there is
reason to be uneasy over uploading, the question of whether the functional
substitution captures the necessary level. The concept of a substitution
level is defined and explored in this paper:
http://iridia.ulb.ac.be/~marchal/publications/CiE2007/SIENA.pdf

I think the matter of the substitution level and the importance of it is
what Ned Block captured in his Blockhead thought experiment (
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blockhead_(computer_system) ), where his
brain was replaced with a lookup table. This can replicate external
behaviors, but it is an entirely different function from one that actually
implements his mind, and thus it may be a zombie or zombie-like.

Jason
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