RE: Trying to simplify my Consciousness hypothesis
February 15, 2017 at 5:41 pm
(This post was last modified: February 15, 2017 at 5:42 pm by I_am_not_mafia.)
(February 15, 2017 at 7:32 am)bennyboy Wrote: Take a computer for example. No matter how complex we can make a computer, we can revise its software, make hardware improvements, and so on. We can probably make computers that will do almost every task better than humans 100% of the time, including making driving decisions in off-road terrain and so on. But at no point of that process would we expect to have to imbue the computer with the ability to know what its like to experience dust or blue skies-- it just has to grind through its data and output a driving behavior.
You might not expect it, don't talk for the rest of us.
What about if the computer was a 100% perfect simulation of all the neurons, dendrites, synapses and neurotransmitters in a real brain, and you then plugged it into a real body with senses?
Why wouldn't it have an equal experience of dust or blue skies?
And if you can't find any reason to argue that there is a difference, then why does it have to be a computer simulation of a neural network? Why not some other adaptive controller that performs exactly the same functionality but in a different way?
What about instead of using a computer, you created an agent controller using cells and put that in a body? Would that then be able to experience? If so, why? Or why not?
The key requirement here is that the agent controller needs to be embodied in an environment and be able to sense and act within it.
Assumptions that you have to have reached a certain level of mental development in order to experience things can lead to really immoral acts. The medical profession used to only give anaesthesia to adults for this very reason. My dad for example remembers having his tonsils cut out of him without anaesthetic when he was a young boy. It's the same mentality that leads to animal or cruelty or abuse of children.
