MatthewW comments on The conscious tape - Less Wrong

11 Post author: PhilGoetz 16 September 2010 07:55PM

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Comment author: MatthewW 16 September 2010 11:44:03PM 1 point [-]

It seems to me that the arguments so lucidly presented elsewhere on Less Wrong would say that the machine is conscious whether or not it is run, and indeed whether or not it is built in the first place: if the Turing machine outputs a philosophical paper on the question of consciousness of the same kind that human philosophers write, we're supposed to take it as conscious.

Comment author: lukstafi 21 March 2011 07:51:01PM 1 point [-]

It is useful to distinguish the properties "a subsystem C of X is conscious in X" and "C exists in a conscious way" (which means that additionally X=reality). I think Nisan expresses that idea in the parent comment.