Hal Finney wrote:
>>>> Bruno:Your desktop computer cannot be conscious, nor can my brain. >>>> If you succeed putting my mind (software) in your desktop >>>> computer, your desktop computer will still not be conscious, but >>>> it will make possible for me to talk with you (as my brain does >>>> now). Only a person can be said conscious. And person, like >>>> nation, or game are immaterial (with comp), and not absolutely >>>> "singularisable" (only relatively). >>> >>> Brent:This confuses me, Bruno. You always postulate 'comp', i.e. that >>> the brain can be emulated. I had always assumed that this entailed >>> the emulation being conscious. > >Hal: I would say to this that consciousness is a property of a program, not >of a computer. When a computer runs a program, the computer does not >thereby become conscious. > >Hal: By analogy, other properties of programs include "being well written" >or "having N^2 running time". When a computer runs such a program we >wouldn't say that the computer is well written, or the computer has >N^2 running time. In the same way we wouldn't say that the computer is >conscious when it runs a conscious program. Charles Goodwin makes the following comment: >So a person isn't conscious either, presumably, since a person is not a >program (at least, not unless everything is). I agree with Hal Finney, or at least with the spirit of Hal Finney's comment. Now, strictly speaking, Charles is right when saying that a person is not a program (no more that a person is a computer or a brain or a liver or a material body). Actually I still don't know what is a person (and that's why I still cannot decide how many person exist O (like James Higgo said), 1 (as I tend to believe) or many, as it looks *apparently*. Much more easy than defining what is a person is to distinguish type of discourse (like 1 and 3 discourse), and then to reason about possible such discourses. The distinction between the brain and the *owner* of the brain is well explained by Hofstadter and Dennet in Mind's I, when they show the shortcomings of Searle's Chinese Room argument. I would say that a person can be seen as a program (or as a sequence of programs) once those terms are interpreted in a sufficiently immaterial or abstract way. I guess Finney was not meaning by program a particular electrical instantiation of a program. Bruno
