On Wed, May 24, 2023, 5:35 AM John Clark <johnkcl...@gmail.com> wrote:
> > On Wed, May 24, 2023 at 1:37 AM Jason Resch <jasonre...@gmail.com> wrote: > > *> By substituting a recording of a computation for a computation, you >> replace a conscious mind with a tape recording of the prior behavior of a >> conscious mind. * > > > But you'd still need a computation to find the particular tape recording > that you need, and the larger your library of recordings the more complex > the computation you'd need to do would be. > > *> This is what happens in the Blockhead thought experiment* > > > And in that very silly thought experiment your library needs to contain > every sentence that is syntactically and grammatically correct. And there > are an astronomical number to an astronomical power of those. Even if every > electron, proton, neutron, photon and neutrino in the observable universe > could record 1000 million billion trillion sentences there would still be > well over a googolplex number of sentences that remained unrecorded. > Blockhead is just a slight variation on Searle's idiotic Chinese room. > It's very different. Note they you don't need to realize or store every possible input for the central point of Block's argument to work. For example, let's say that AlphaZero was conscious for the purposes of this argument. We record each of its 361 possible responses AlphaZero produces to each of the different opening moves on a Go board and store the result in a lookup table. This table would be only a few kilobytes. Then we can ask, what has happened to the conscious of AlphaZero? Here we have a functionally equivalent response for all possible second moves, but we've done away with all the complexity of the prior computation. What the substitution level argument really asks is how far up in the subroutines of a mind's program can we implement memoization ( https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Memoization ) before the result is some kind of altered consciousness, or at least some diminished contribution to the measure of a conscious experience (under duplicationist conceptions of measure). Jason > -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Everything List" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/everything-list/CA%2BBCJUg29ypDhX_3sZTTLZuFdWV%2Be86WVvin9r878U%3D1XNMAxg%40mail.gmail.com.
