It isn't an information process, it's a chemical process- because information can't trigger a neuron.
I see no reason why subjective experience needs to have had a survival purpose in the past; isn't it also possible that self-awareness was a contra-survival byproduct of some other function, which was prosurvivial in the distant past? I don't think that sentience is the appendix of the mind, but "because we have it" isn't in the list of evidence against that hypothesis.
Suppose that we figured out how the enconding of the sensory and motor nerves, such that we could interpret them and duplicate them: Then we put a human brain in a box, wired it to false nerves and provided it with an internally consistent set of sensory inputs that reacted to the motor outputs. I see no reason why that brain would have less subjective experience in that state than normal. (If you do, then disagree with me on this point, and it becomes open to verification)
Take the other example- a computer which can pass the Turing test is wired into a human body, taking the sensory nervous inputs as its inputs and the motor nerve outputs as its outputs, and other humans cannot tell without inspecting inside the skull that it is an artificial computer. Depending on your position on zombieism, this entity may or may not have subjective experience.
Now, take the zombie computer, and hook it up to the false nervous inputs: If it didn't have subjective experience in a real body, then it doesn't have it now; if so, why does a human brain have subjective experience, given that it takes the same inputs and provides the same outputs? If It did have subjective experience in a real body, but doesn't have it now, why the change, since nothing within the entity to be tested is different? If it still has subjective experience, then at least one computer simulation of a human interacting with a computer simulation of a world has subjective experience. Why is it not the case of all such simulations?
Today's post, Against Modal Logics was originally published on 27 August 2008. A summary (taken from the LW wiki):
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This post is part of the Rerunning the Sequences series, where we'll be going through Eliezer Yudkowsky's old posts in order so that people who are interested can (re-)read and discuss them. The previous post was Dreams of AI Design, and you can use the sequence_reruns tag or rss feed to follow the rest of the series.
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