2009/8/25 Brent Meeker <meeke...@dslextreme.com>: > I think so, IF the alien brain were given the stimuli it evolved to > interpret - otherwise the alien might just experience noise. But, as > I understand it, the MGA still relies on the context of some external > physics to provide the intuition that it is realizing consciousness. > Hypothetically, one can include more and more context within the > simulation, but then it seems that one is creating consciousness > relative to a new simulated physics. It's like the conundrum of the > rock that is conscious because it implements all computations...in > some interpretation.
Let's say the alien brain in its initial environment produced a certain output when it was presented with a certain input, such as a red light. The reconstructed brain is in a different environment and is presented with a blue light instead of a red light. To deal with this, you alter the brain's configuration so that it produces the same output with the blue light that it would have produced with the red light. You do this with every stimulus it receives from the Earth environment, so that the reconstructed alien believes it is on its home planet, talking to its own kind. It would be a very difficult task, but you could do it by careful observation of the original brain and environment. The end result would be a completely different brain in a completely different environment, related to the original by an enormously complex mapping, which would have the same experiences as the original. Now suppose that this mapping (which plays no part in the actual physical process of the computation) is ad hoc, for any given putative brain-environment system... leading to the conundrum of conscious rocks. Which step in the preceding is wrong? Is it perhaps that there are constraints on the proposed remapping, so that it isn't actually possible to map any sufficiently complex physical system onto a given finite state machine? -- Stathis Papaioannou --~--~---------~--~----~------------~-------~--~----~ You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Everything List" group. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com To unsubscribe from this group, send email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en -~----------~----~----~----~------~----~------~--~---