[ExI] Do digital computers feel?

[Ben]

Brent Allsop wrote:
 > I think it is true that "If you know something, there must be 
something that is that knowledge."  Would you agree?

No.
Not some/thing/.

I don't think knowledge is a 'thing', it's a process. As John K Clark 
would put it, knowledge isn't a noun, it's more like a verb or an 
adjective. This means that there is no such thing as 'a knowledge', but 
there is such a thing as 'knowing'.

More conventionally put, knowledge (and experience) is an 
information-process.

So your statement above could be reworded: "If you know something, there 
must be an information process that is that knowing".

 > For example, you pointed out that you can produce an after image 
experience by staring at cyan for a while and then quickly looking at 
white.  I think it is very telling about what you are ignoring in this 
example, in that you didn't actually say the result was a redness 
experience.

I know what the result is. I wasn't ignoring it, I was leaving it for 
the reader to discover. Again, it's important not to confuse the 
'redness experience' for a thing. It's a process. In this case, a 
process that is the experience of something that isn't there. Which was 
the point of using that example.


 > You say it is: " 'conjured up' by our visual system."  But I ask you, 
what is it, that is conjured up?  Is it not knowledge that has a redness 
quality which you can experience as the final result of the processing 
of your visual system?

And again, no 'thing' is conjured up. There's just the conjuring itself. 
That is the process of experiencing a red ball right in front of you. 
What I mean by 'conjuring up' is that  a vast amount of information is 
combined in various ways. No 'things' are involved, except as components 
of the substrate that embodies the processing (membranes and ions, mostly).

You might ask "Yes, but what does that consist of?". The only answer we 
can give is that the process is embodied as patterns of neural 
activation that lead to responses such as wanting to kick the red ball, 
or running away, if you happen to be afraid of big red balls, or saying 
"Oooh, look, a big red ball!", etc.
We don't yet know exactly what the information processing consists of, 
we just know that it's fantastically complex and that our brains do it 
easily. One day we will know, and then we'll be able to build new minds, 
and understand our own.

Because it's a process, the actual embodiment doesn't matter, as long as 
it's capable of doing the required processing. A planet full of 
beer-cans connected with string could do it (slowly), or a large 
computer, a massive ant colony, etc. (have you read "Wang's Carpets" by 
Greg Egan? That contains a good description of this idea). Anything that 
can process information with the required degree of complexity, provided 
it was connected to suitable inputs and outputs, can do it.


Ben Zaiboc