Ben_Jones comments on Angry Atoms - Less Wrong

30 Post author: Eliezer_Yudkowsky 31 March 2008 12:28AM

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Comment author: Ben_Jones 31 March 2008 01:53:18PM 0 points [-]

If I cut a brain in half, the mind will stop working*. But if I cut a radio in half, it will stop playing songs, no magic there. Playing songs could be considered an emergent phenomenon arising from the configuration of the bits of the radio, but let's be frank here, it's just what the radio does.

Large iterations of simple patterns are the basis for most examples of complexity. The mind is an extreme case of this, but that doesn't imbue it with a magical irreducibility, any more than we should think that a whole, working radio is magical. It's all or nothing here folks - either consciousness is an irreducible phenomenon that only works on meat (for some reason we're still waiting to hear) or it's just a very complex arrangement of meat that, for obvious reasons, we've only seen in meat so far.

[Please, no-one quote me a case of some guy having half his brain removed and getting by just fine.]