Peterdjones comments on Mixed Reference: The Great Reductionist Project - Less Wrong

29 Post author: Eliezer_Yudkowsky 05 December 2012 12:26AM

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Comment author: Peterdjones 26 December 2012 10:52:29AM -1 points [-]

if you simulate a brain with a Turing machine, it won't have qualia (because: qualia is clearly a basic fact of physics and there's no way just using physics to tell whether something is a Turing-machine-simulating-a-brain or not)

It isn't even clear to Searle that qualia are physically basic. He thinks consciousness is a a high-level outcome of the brain's concrete causal powers. His objection to computaional apporaches is rooted in the abstract nature of computation, not in the physcial basiscness of qualia. (In fact, he doesn't use the word "qualia", although he often seems to be talking about the same thing).