= 27d567bc2d48d9f40e9ccc20ea370b15)
Shawn Mikula here. Allow me to clear up the confusion that appears to have been caused by being quoted out of context. I clearly state in the part of my answer preceding the quoted text the following:
"2) assuming you can run accurate simulations of the mind based on these structural maps, are they conscious?".
So this is not a question of misunderstanding universal computation and whether a computer simulation can mimic, for practical purposes, the computations of the brain. I am already assuming the computer simulation is mimicking the brain's activity and computations. My point is that a computer works very differently from a brain which is evident in differences in its underlying causal structure. In other words, the coordinated activity of the binary logic gates underlying the computer running the simulation has a vastly different causal structure than the coordinated activity and massive parallelism of neurons in a brain.
The confusion appears to result from the fact that I'm not talking about the pseudo-causal structure of the modeling units comprising the simulation, but rather the causal structure of the underlying physical basis of the computer running the simulation.
Anyway, I hope this helps.
= b715d02e85f7b3b4ae65ca3d3e450868)
Subscribe to RSS Feed
= f037147d6e6c911a85753b9abdedda8d){kind=logo}
I think we might be working with different definitions of the term "causal structure"? The way I see it, what matters for whether or not two things have the same causal structure is counterfactual dependency - if neuron A hadn't have fired, then neuron B would have fired. And we all agree that in a perfect simulation this kind of dependency is preserved. So yes, neurons and transistors have different lower-level causal behaviour, but I wouldn't call that a different causal structure as long as they both implement a system that behaves the same under different counterfactuals. That's what I think is wrong with your GIF example, btw - there's no counterfactual dependency whatsoever. If I delete a particular pixel from one frame of the animation, the next frame wouldn't change at all. Of course there was the proper dependency when the GIF was originally computed, and I would certainly say that that computation, however it was implemented, was conscious. But not the GIF itself, no.
Anyway, beyond that, we're obviously working from very different intuitions, because I don't see the China Brain or Turing machine examples as reductio's at all - I'm perfectly willing to accept that those entities would be conscious.
Thank you, you saved me a lot of typing. No amount of straight copying of that GIF will generate a conscious experience; but if you print out the first frame and give it to a person with a set of rules for simulating neural behaviour and tell them to calculate the subsequent frames into a gigantic paper notebook, that might generate consciousness.