•You seem to be suggesting that even if it does behave like a person (as with the Chinese Room), I should still dismiss the claim, based on some pre-existing theory about a "human spark" and what kinds of things such a spark can reside in. That suggestion seems unjustified to me. But then, I give the Systems Reply to Searle: if the room can carry on a conversation in Chinese, then the room knows Chinese, whether the person inside the room knows Chinese or not.
Until shown otherwise, I believe there are two possible kinds of systems that behave like a consciousness: 1) Conscious systems 2) Systems built to look like conscious systems that are not conscious systems.
A strong AI-like hypothesis for artificial consciousness would essentially be the statement that systems of the 2nd type are not possible, that a system built to look similar enough to consciousness must itself be conscious. This is a hypothesis, an assumption, possibly untestable, certainly untested. Until Strong AI-Consciousness is proved, it seems counterproductive to assume it.
Let me ask you a question about the Chinese Room. Suppose someone implemented an emulation of you as a chinese room. A chinese room can certainly implement a Turing machine, suppose you do believe that you (including your action with the world around you) are nothig more than a Turing machine. Once this chinese room was up and running, call it TheChineseDave, what moral status does it hold? Would you feel it was immoral to open the doors to this chinese room and yell in to all the people there "Hey the experiment is over, you can all go home." Would you think that you had committed murder, or even killed something?
I agree that type-1 and type-2 systems are both possible.
A number of hypotheses that I would label "strong AI" don't claim that type-2 systems are impossible, they merely claim that type-1 systems can be constructed by means other than gestating a zygote. (That said, I don't think it matters much what we attach the label "strong AI" to.)
Re: your question... it's probably worth saying that I don't believe that it's possible in practice to construct a classic Chinese Room (that is, one in which the rules for how to respond to inputs are e...
Suppose I have choice between the following:
A) One simulation of me is run for me 100 years, before being deleted.
B) Two identical simulations of me are run for 100 years, before being deleted.
Is the second choice preferable to the first? Should I be willing to pay more to have multiple copies of me simulated, even if those copies will have the exact same experiences?
Forgive me if this question has been answered before. I have Googled to no avail.