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bogus comments on The two insights of materialism - Less Wrong
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I think Phil Goetz is using the term "simulate" in its computational or mathematical sense: The materialist of the first kind would agree that if you had a pretty good algorithmic model of a brain, you could simulate that model in a computer and it would behave just like the brain. But they would not agree that the simulation had consciousness.
ETA: Correct me if I'm wrong, but a materialist of the first kind would be one who is open to the possibility of p-zombies.
No, p-zombies are supposed to be indistinguishable from the real thing. You can tell apart a simulation of consciousness from an actual conscious being, because the simulation is running on a different substrate.
Basically, yes. But I think it's worthwhile to distinguish between physically (the original definition), functionally, and behaviorally identical p-zombies, where materialists reject the possibility of the first, and functionalists reject the first and second (each is obviously a superset of the former).
NB: "Functionally identical" is handwaving, absent some canonical method of figuring out what computation a physical system implements (the conscious-rocks argument).