Is There a Point To Living a Moral Life?

[genkaus]

I'd hardly say a machine e.g. a computer that processes data, interprets the meaning of said data. A machine is simply a contraption that causally goes from A to B e.g. a civil engineer inputting loads on a model of a structure, then the computer via electricity and causal relations of electrons processing the input to arrive at the output i.e. how the building performs under those loads.

Whoa - Deja-vu!

Anyway, to say that assigning and interpreting meaning is a form of data processing is not to say that all forms of data processing amount to assigning or interpreting meaning.

But the conputer suffers from the same problems as I highlighted in my previous post: how can electrons and stored data in the hard drive be *about* something? The output data, which is causally being shown as pixels on a screen, are meaningless, until a conscious entity assigns anything meaningful to it. In this case, it's the civil engineer who assigns meaning to the pixels which represent the resulting axial forces, shear stresses and moments on the members. The computer isn't capable of such an interpretation. And this is rather obvious - it's not a conscious entity like the engineer.

When you say "conscious entity" - which level of consciousness are you talking about? Any entity can be conscious without being self-aware or sentient.

In college, we used to work with two or three different softwares where one would automatically pass on its output data onto the other for processing and so on, and all we had to do was see the final results. As far as the intermediate outputs were concerned, we never became aware of them. The only entities conscious of them were the next programs in line. Those programs - according to predefined categories - handles the job of interpreting results and assigning meanings. Clearly, the conscious entity at the level of engineer is not necessarily required.